Alice Unbound

by Colleen Anderson

  Tench has heard, in his life before the train, of new railway carriages with corridors down the middle, and dining-cars, and even lavatories! If he could walk, his thighs might zingle to life, but then, so might his bladder, so perhaps everything is for the best. Stillness is also best for preventing rumpling and tearing of the seat of his paper pants. He has been on this train for – how long? He can’t quite remember boarding.

  Tench is not an animal. He is a gentleman, a gentleman dressed in white paper. And he is going to the Fourth Row, where he belongs.

  “A good day for travelling,” the Goat bleats.

  Tench realizes he has been frowning. He ought to be cheerful; he ought to be grateful.

  “Nothing better than a journey on a day like today,” Tench supplies, and the passengers rush to agree.

  “Nothing like travel to broaden the mind!”

  That from a Beetle, just beyond the Goat. The Beetle wasn’t there a moment before, but then, people come and go on the train. Tench doesn’t ask questions. It isn’t done.

  The valise resting on his lap opens its mouth and yawns. A vulgar habit. Tench pushes the lid back down and fastens it. He carefully recrosses his legs, and that’s when he sees the mark.

  Something – something – from the Goat’s chamber pot. An umber smudge on the crisp cuff of Tench’s trouser leg.

  It’s work, wearing whiteness. His father taught him to take pride in that work. Whiteness is so fragile, tears so easily. It must be patched up, papered over, smoothed taut, many times each day. This is how a gentleman shows his loyalty to the White King.

  Paper means work. Whiter than linen, humbler than silk. Paper shows every stain and tear; paper, well maintained, shows absolute devotion. Paper takes a crease like a knife. Outer purity, inner purity, and three times six is nine. That was always Father Tench’s motto.

  He looks up, and feels the blood rush to his ears. Opposite him is a child, with ribbons in its hair. She’s arguing with the guard, though, and isn’t looking at Tench’s trouser leg. The train has paused, as it does, from time to time, and people appear and disappear. Not Tench, though. Never Tench. He is still waiting for his stop to come.

  The guard is chastising the girl for travelling in the wrong direction. She must be a Red, then. The wrong sort altogether. Tench certainly doesn’t want to fraternize with Reds. The people listening to his thoughts must know that. There are people listening, of course, but it’s impossible to say who. Perhaps that Gnat who was flitting about earlier. Tench is happy to be listened in on. The White King must know what is happening in his domain. Tench has nothing to hide.

  “So young a child,” said Tench, recrossing his legs casually, “ought to know which way she is going, even if she doesn’t know her own name!”

  The Goat widens his eyes, and bleats wildly, “She ought to know her own name, even if she doesn’t know her own alphabet!”

  Everyone choruses in, and the child’s eyebrows do a funny dance. It looks like it might cry. Perhaps it truly didn’t understand about the train’s destination. Very likely it was not raised properly. Tench has nothing against Reds. They are wrong, that’s all, waiting for their King to wake instead of accepting that life is much better when the White King rules alone. Tench has nothing against this child.

  Tench leans forward, close enough, he hopes, that no one will overhear.

  “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.”

  “Indeed I shan’t!” shouts the impertinent creature. “I don’t belong to this railway journey at all.”

  The passengers all gasp. Everyone must be where they belong. If you’re not where you belong, someone else soon will be, Father Tench used to say.

  Father Tench was killed by a Red Knight because Father Tench was in the place where he shouldn’t have been. It was a mistake. He was trying to make it to Fifth Row. Queen’s orders. Then the Knight went loopedy-lop – they’re so hard to predict, Knights, unless you’re a mathematician, which Father Tench was assuredly not.

  Flowers in the surrounding fields found bits of paper, floating on the air, for weeks afterward.

  The train’s rumble becomes a whirr, a loudness without noise, and now the bench beneath Tench’s rear seems more comfortable. It is not a bench at all, but a kind of chair, and on his right is an armrest, and a new person. A woman with a mass of dark hair, reading a book.

  Beyond her a small oval window does not open, and outside the window, Tench sees clouds.

  The tops of clouds.

  He would lose his breakfast, if his breakfast were still with him. Breakfast was so long ago he hardly remembers it. The journey to the Fourth Row is very long.

  This is a wonder for which he was not prepared.

  He stands, as best he can in a space cramped by the back of a row of seats in front, and peers out. He sees a silver wing, unmoving, and sky beneath it. Down far below, in a smudge of green and brown, he thinks he sees a world.

  He sits back down, hard, and bites his tongue. The white paper cocked hat tumbles off his head onto the valise in his lap.

  “Now where did you come from?” says the woman.

  Tench rolls his wounded tongue in his mouth, swallows blood. What an impertinent question, when he is clearly a pawn, and not capable of movement in any direction but one. He looks to his left, where a boy-child sits, staring at something shiny in its hands, images moving brightly on its surface. Beyond the boy, another woman, her eyes closed as she leans against the curved wall of the compartment, or belly, or whatever has swallowed him. And another oval window, looking out onto sky.

  This is not a train.

  People say the Red King flew on a bird to his forest home across the sundering sea, when he abandoned the world. And there he sleeps, still, oblivious.

  Tench is not oblivious. Tench can hardly breathe.

  “Are you in the right seat?” says the woman. “You get lost on your way back from the bathroom?”

  He frowns, confused. He picks up his hat, and regards it. “I’m trying to get to Fourth Row.”

  “That’s up there a ways.” Her face clears, then wrinkles again. “Have you got a first-class ticket?”

  Alas, he does not. He clicks the fasteners on the valise in his lap and opens it. Inside, 700 sheets of pure white paper. He pinches the corner of the top one, slides it off the pile and hands it to her. “I have a ticket but it is second class. I can’t be expected to have first class, not yet.”

  Second class is undeniably a gentleman’s class, his mother said. First class is for gentlemen who have proven their purity. Once he gets to Fourth Row, then everything will be cocktails and cravats. He closes his valise with a righteous click. Then he jams his paper hat down, hard, on his head.

  “No, of course not,” says the woman slowly, glancing up at the aisle between the seats. Another woman is walking toward them, her hand on the seat-back in front.

  “Can I help?” she says.

  “Oh, it’s nothing too serious,” says the woman in the seat. “This man is lost, I think. He wasn’t here before.”

  Tench was here, of course he was here. The trouble is that here was not here.

  “Not here?”

  “I think I would have remembered a man in a paper suit.”

  The standing woman nods, frowns. “I think I would too. Show me your boarding pass, please, sir.”

  Tench picks up the ticket from where the other woman let it drop on the armrest and hands it to the standing woman. His papers are in order. He has nothing to hide.

  He is in the air. Where is the beast flying to? That’s the question, surely. Is it flying to the stars?

  Her face clouds. “This is a blank sheet of paper.” She hands it back to him, accusingly.

  Tench stretches his cheeks into a smile. It’s best to remain happy. Gentlemen adjust to their circumstances and do not complain about their lot. “Nothing like travel to broaden the mind!” he shouts, perhaps, a little too loud, to b
e heard over the roar of the beast.

  There are no smiles on any of these people’s faces. It is a strangely homogenous assembly, with no Animals in it at all. He folds his ticket and puts it into his origami breast pocket.

  “Please keep your voice down,” says the standing woman. “What is your name, sir?”

  That’s an easy question. He ought to know the answer to that. “Pawns have no use for names on the board,” he recites. “Names can be changed as often as guards. I ought to know that I am a gentleman, even if I don’t know my own name. I ought to know that the White King is infallible, even if I don’t know that I am a gentleman.”

  Little Theophilus Tench, as only his family called him, was a well-behaved student. He can barely remember the days when the Red King was still awake, still on the board. In those days, the Red King and the White fought, and there were not so many rules. It must have been terrifying.

  The standing woman reaches over him, pushes something. Then someone has him by the hands and ties something cold and stiff around his wrists. He opens his mouth to cry out, and then he remembers that he is a gentleman, that the rules are there to protect him.

  Then a man dressed in rough blues and blacks, like a bruise all over, is lifting him by his tied wrists and Tench is standing in the cramped cabin, his valise bumping down to the floor.

  As he stumbles down the aisle, the man’s hand on his back, his suit gashes in three places. A rip across his back, a tear on his sleeve, and worst of all, most ungentlemanly of all, a split in the seat. His whiteness is meant to protect him, to signal his worth to the world, but it’s falling off him here. Is he not good enough for Fourth Row? Is this where failed pawns go, off the board, into the abyss? What could he have done to deserve that punishment? Tench is trying to not think disloyal thoughts, he truly is, but a man is nothing without his papers, and his papers are in the valise.

  The man straps him down on a little seat all his own in a quieter part of the flying beast. Someone took the valise, but Tench can’t see where. The man stands, watching him, with something small and black and sickening in his hand. Tench says nothing. His thoughts are so loud that for a moment he thinks he has spoken them, so he hushes them as best he can. He smiles, very certain that all of this is for his own good.

  “You won’t be smiling when we get to La Guardia,” says the man, scowling.

  Everyone talks such nonsense here.

  After a while the beast moves uncertainly, and so does Tench’s stomach. There’s a jolt and then the beast is speeding so horribly fast that Tench’s body strains against the strap.

  But they do not die. The man grabs him, tearing his whiteness, marching him toward a bright door in the beast, an opening into some other world.

  It comes to him then. Theophilus Tench understands at last.

  This is the way to Fourth Row. This is the test each pawn must pass, to show the requisite courage to be rooked or beknighted. A test to show one is ready to die for the White King, for purity and order.

  Tench smiles with teeth, as he walks down a staircase into bright sunshine, on some part of the board he has never seen: broad, empty, paved silvery like a giant’s courtyard, filled with great beasts moving before great fortress walls.

  “A remarkable day for travelling!” he shouts. “A wonderful day to die!”

  People are shouting on the ground, surrounding the staircase, pointing shining black sticks at him, and he stumbles forward, smiling desperately, blinking back tears. At last he is doing what his father did, before his father died.

  Bits of white paper, floating in the air.

  He tries, he tries, to keep his thoughts worthy, or at least to keep them quiet. To not question why the White King mistrusts his pawns so. To not wonder whether he, Theophilus Tench, might want to do something other than sit, dressed in white paper, in hopes of a reward of coffee and crossword puzzles and not being slaughtered.

  He tries, but he fails.

  Something hard knocks him on the head from behind. The man behind him lets go his grasp, and shouts, and the valise is fluttering in the air. Six hundred and ninety-nine sheets of pure white paper fly out of it, folding themselves into dart-like shapes like flying beasts. They fill the sky, crowding around Tench and his captor, and something bangs, three times, loudly.

  Whiteness flutters angrily in the air, confounding the man’s attempts to take Tench again.

  Yes, Tench thinks, and nearly weeps with relief. I am angry! Attack!

  The valise bangs shut and shoves its handle into Tench’s bound hands like an affectionate puppy. Tench can barely see with all the paper whirring around but his fingers curl around the handle and then the valise is opening again, flapping its sides, rising into the sky and carrying Tench with it.

  Suddenly a red pain soaks his white trouser leg. He glances down, but dare not let go of the valise handle. Underneath him beasts of all sizes and shapes rumble, and rise into the sky, but the valise flies quickly over dark water. This must be what it is like to travel as a queen travels, Tench thinks, loudly, as they skim the tops of trees.

  The valise catches in a tree branch and Tench is knocked tumbling down to the ground. The noise of the bellicose beasts of Fourth Row is subtler now, distant. Still, he dare not stop.

  He looks up gratefully at the valise, which has settled happily into the crook of the tree, and seems to want no more to do with him.

  The trees shade him as he walks, his hands still bound, his leg smarting but not, it seems, deeply wounded. He relieves his poor bladder at last and starts to feel hungry again. His hat is still on his head, by some miracle. Everything is quiet here, and Tench is quite alone with his thoughts. He thinks things he never dared think before. He is off the board, without his papers, with no way to patch his suit. A pawn no longer. His pants are stained half red and his shirt is torn half off. A gentleman dressed in white paper, he was, this morning. Now he is – something underneath. Something motley, ragged, alone, afraid, ready.

  Before long, he comes to the pebbled shoreline of a great dark ocean. Boats, small and large, float on it as far as the horizon. The water laps his toes.

  The sundering sea. Somewhere, beyond this, the Red King lies sleeping. Might it be possible to wake him, and speak to him?

  Tench yanks the white hat off his head and looks at it. It is a good hat: confidently cocked and neatly folded, its seams sure, made of many layers of white paper, its borders rolled thick. Quite practical.

  He drops it, upside down, on the water. As it floats, it grows, until it is big enough for Tench to step into. It rocks a little as Tench settles into it, kneeling.

  He has no oar so he slides his ticket out of his breast pocket, unfolds it, and holds it up with both hands for a sail. He lets the wind take him out to sea. Tench sails close enough to Fourth Row to see its fortress but it does not see him. He sails in his paper boat, in search of the Red King, and the chance to ask some questions.

  THE KING IN RED

  AN ABOMINATION IN FOUR ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES

  J.Y.T. Kennedy

  Attitude One: Anticipation

  On a desolate street, the dingy neon

  sketched a lady lewd with lighted tits

  rudely blinking. A blended staleness

  of beer and smoke, of smut and rot,

  greeted me at the door. The greying proprietor

  let me talk as he smeared the tables

  with an unrinsed rag. He raised a sneer.

  “No warrant I guess? You’re wasting time,

  but I’ve nothing to hide, so have your way.

  Look all you please. I’d like to know

  who stole the tarts.” I turned to my search:

  dressing rooms and dreary nooks,

  the tawdry stage and narrow stairs

  that led below. I’d laughed before

  at my sister’s belief in superstitious tales

  of girls who disappeared down those steps

  not to be seen or numbered again

/>   amongst living or dead. A dampness rose

  from the windless dark: a winding caress,

  the last weak breath of a broken soul.

  My deception felt thin: no detective in truth,

  only a woman seeking a sister and peace.

  I had made ready for mundane ugliness:

  for a grimy passage and grisly secrets

  not for this naked feeling, this nauseous sense

  of standing poised, one step from falling.

  My heart staggered with a hopeless lust

  to cast my soul into the sensate void.

  Black stars rose at the stairwell’s foot

  and a sudden wind whipped through my hair.

  One wanton step, and the world was gone.

  Attitude Two: Incomprehension

  I gasped and staggered in the gaping air.

  A fetid field gave my feet purchase,

  crusted with dank and crippled weeds,

  overlooking a lightless, brooding lake.

  A towering barrow was built on the shore

  on which a lordly figure was laid in state,

  draped in royal robes as red as blood.

  Another man stood, crowned and starkly pale,

  his hair a halo of high-flown clouds

  that dog the moon, his clothes milk-white,

  near to my side. He said, with a smile

  more fey than kind: “That is the King in Red.

  He buries himself in heedless slumber

  dreaming of your life to draw his mind

  from sorrow’s grip. He sacrificed all

  the ones he loved, and lost just the same.

  I was his doom. I took daughters, sons

  horses, halls, even his haughty queen:

  laid waste his world. No wonder I became

  a hated thing that haunts his dreams.”

  He might have spoken of sports or games,

  so casually he talked, so calmly he smiled,

  but it hurt me to think of hatred and love.

  I said, “I am seeking my sister and others

  who came here as I did.” He cocked his head.

  “I told you: your talk, in turn my answers,