The car was called a Duesenberg. It was very old and, Mathilde had to admit, very fancy. That was probably why the Witherspoons had picked it out. Their enormous house was old and fancy and full of fancy old things. Even Theodorus’s room, for all the boy’s fascination with spaceships and technology, was crowded with antique furniture that he and Mathilde were constantly having to shove to the side to make room for their elaborate games.
“The dress looks nice,” said Malachi, from behind the Wall Street Journal.
“Thank you,” said Mathilde. She was looking out the window. Malachi’s house was in an older part of Charleston, near the city center, but the Witherspoon estate was miles outside the city, on the grounds of an old indigo plantation. They had just turned off the state highway and the driver was stopping at the wrought iron gates. A pair of uniformed guards, one holding a clipboard, stood outside a small gatehouse.
“They want your invitation, Mr. Schwartz,” the driver said over his shoulder.
Malachi dug through some of the papers in his bulging briefcase, muttering to himself. Then he checked the pockets of his suit jacket. A joker like his daughter, Malachi also wore specially tailored clothing, his tastes tending to conservative business wear that did little to disguise the shape of his nearly spherical body.
“Send them back here,” he said after a moment, rolling down the window.
The guard with the clipboard leaned in and smiled. “Mr. Schwartz,” he said. “You know Mrs. Witherspoon and her security protocols.”
“I don’t have an invitation,” Malachi said. “I’m not sure I was even given an invitation.”
The guard—Mathilde didn’t have to read his name badge to know he was called Carl, because this ritual of always being stopped for paperwork Malachi had always misplaced was a familiar one—checked his clipboard. “You’re listed here, sir.”
“Then let us in, please,” said Malachi. “We’re a pair of jokers in a bright orange sixty-year-old limousine and we’ve been here dozens of times. You know who we are.”
Carl looked embarrassed. “No offense, sir, but didn’t you yourself once tell me that there are jokers and aces and so on who can change their shapes?”
Malachi sighed. “Yes, Carl. I did tell you that.”
“Let them through, Carl,” came a new voice, a boy’s voice on the young side of puberty. “I’ll vouch for them.”
“Theodorus!” Mathilde said, opening the door and forcing the guard to step back. “Did you ride down here on your bike?”
The slightly rotund blond boy grinned, one cheek dimpling deeply. “Sidecar attached! Let’s go!”
“Hold on—” said Malachi and Carl simultaneously, but the children were already scrambling through the gate and onto—and into, in Mathilde’s case—a scaled-down motorcycle with a bullet-shaped sidecar. The bike was painted metallic red, with fanciful gouts of flame stenciled on the fuel tank. Blue streamers hung from the ends of the handlebars.
Theodorus, somewhat clumsily, operated the kick-starter, and the bike more purred than roared to life. “We’ll see you up at the house, Malachi!” he called, and Mathilde waved at her father as they sped away.
“Does your mother still think you’re in danger of being kidnapped?” Mathilde asked, half shouting.
“I wouldn’t mind being kidnapped,” Theodorus replied distractedly, intent on operating the bike. “If it was by pirates, maybe. Or Takisians. Anyway, I don’t know. Mother’s just overprotective, like always.”
Mrs. Witherspoon, like most adults and most “natural” people, presented Mathilde with challenges. The cheerful woman insisted that Mathilde call her “Alice” even while Malachi, in turn, insisted that Mathilde address all adults besides himself with honorifics, which meant her world was full of people she called Mrs. This or Mr. That or Dr. The Other. So Mrs. Witherspoon, Alice, had entered into a conspiracy with Mathilde that required her to carefully check to see if Malachi was in earshot every time she spoke to the woman. Like most things concerning adults, it was exhausting.
Seeing Theodorus, though, even at a party that promised to be populated with nobody but misses and misters and doctors, with the odd professor and colonel thrown in, made up for it. The only time Theodorus ever went by an honorific was when he was Captain Theodorus Witherspoon, kid pilot, youngest ever recruit to the U.S. Space Command, and the two of them were lying on the floor with their legs straight up against some expensive piece of furniture, prepared to blast into orbit and do battle with aliens or Russians.
In these instances, Mathilde was Lieutenant Maréchal, with responsibilities including navigation, weapons control, and watching for Mrs. Witherspoon when Theodorus made one of his frequent raids on the kitchen for extra snacks.
Which was something they did now.
Theodorus brought the bike to a halt outside the exterior door to the kitchen and Mathilde clambered out of the sidecar. The two of them made for the door at a dead run, but stopped short when the way was blocked by a Black man wearing a tuxedo. It was James, the butler and chief of the Witherspoons’ domestic staff. He was carrying a jacket and a tie.
“Let’s see the pants legs,” he said, not trying too hard to hide a smile.
“I was careful,” said Theodorus, turning around and putting his legs in and out like he was doing the Hokey Pokey. “No grease, see?”
“I see,” said James. “Do you need me to tie this? You remember the half-Windsor knot?”
“I remember,” said Theodorus, taking the tie and jacket. “I’ll put this stuff on when they call us down.”
Then on into the rambling kitchen, where the cook, a Black woman named Dorothy, was casting a critical eye over the nervous gaggle of catering staff who’d been brought in for the event. Mathilde waved to get Dorothy’s attention and raised her eyebrows, enquiring.
“On the butcher’s block, Miss Mathilde,” said Dorothy.
The two of them scrambled to the far end of the kitchen and found a tray of mille-feuilles topped with toasted almonds and a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. Dorothy had learned to make the complicated pastry shortly after Mathilde began visiting the estate.
“Hurry,” said Theodorus. “We want to get a good start on our mission before they make us come downstairs and do boring stuff.”
Malachi had recently asked Mathilde if she thought Theodorus, who would shortly turn fourteen, wasn’t getting a little old for pretending. She hadn’t answered him, but she’d spent a fair amount of time thinking about the answer. She’d decided that while it was possible that Theodorus behaved the way he did—Mrs. Witherspoon would have said “carried on” the way he did—either to humor her or because of some kind of lack of maturity on his own part, it was unlikely.
She remembered the first time she had ever seen him, perhaps a week after her bewildering and grief-stricken move from France to South Carolina. Her father, whom she had met in person just once before her mother’s death, had told her that he was going to introduce her to other children, but that turned out to mean just a single other child, and she had seen at a glance that he was older than her, a nat, and yes, a boy. Which might have been, as the Americans said, three strikes, but Theodorus had looked up from the elaborate model train set he was working on and greeted her in clear, grammatically perfect French that somehow managed to retain his cultured Low Country drawl.
And so, the friendship and partnership that constituted Mathilde’s only peer relationship began. They were both educated far beyond their years, both voracious readers, both dreamers of big, colorful, somewhat incoherent dreams having to do with their individual futures. Theodorus, of course, would somehow manage to be both a space pilot and a spy. Mathilde would be an engineer, of spaceships perhaps, sure, why not? And also possibly a spy.
They would stay friends their whole lives, despite everything; this had been solemnly sworn. It seemed impossible that anything could stop them.
Until this day, the day of a boring adult party at the Witherspoon estate in July
of 1979. The day they escaped the guards at the gate and sneaked through the kitchen and up the back staircase with armloads of sandwiches and sugary drinks, bound for Mars.
The day Theodorus got sick.
The day his card turned.
Eleven years old is a very young age to tease out the difference between knowing something “intellectually” and knowing something down at the bottom of your heart.
“So you see, Mathilde,” finished the man; this was a Dr. Something brought in by the Witherspoons from a northern clinic to treat Theodorus, recruited in turn by Malachi to talk to her, “the wild card simply isn’t contagious in the way you’re thinking. There’s absolutely no way you could have infected your friend. The virus had almost certainly been present in Theodorus’s genome for years, maybe even from birth—we’re still running tests.”
“Neither of his parents are jokers,” Mathilde said quietly.
The doctor shook his head. “That doesn’t really figure in, dear. The fact that both you and your father are jokers is actually somewhat unusual.” He looked uncomfortable with this line of thought, and abruptly stood.
They were in the dining room of Malachi’s house, and the doctor placed his hand on some papers he’d left on the table. “Your father tells me that you’re a very bright little girl, so maybe this material will help you see things more clearly. They’re educational pamphlets from the Van Renssaeler Clinic in New York, where Dr. Tachyon works.”
Mathilde nodded, not looking at the man or at the papers, not getting up from her chair. The man awkwardly patted her on the shoulder, stood still for a moment, then left the room. A moment later, Mathilde heard the low sounds of conversation in the foyer. Malachi and the doctor, no doubt talking about her.
She considered going to the door to see if she could hear what they were saying more clearly, but when she climbed down from her chair, she found her gaze drawn to the pamphlets on the table. The one on the top showed a black-and-white photograph of the famous Dr. Tachyon, the alien from the planet Takis who had spent the last three decades trying to combat the wild card virus developed by his kinsmen. He had long hair and was wearing a hat out of a Dumas novel. He was looking out of the picture seriously, deep concern in his eyes. Printed below the picture, in large type, was a headline. SO YOU’RE A JOKER. NOW WHAT?
Mathilde brushed the pamphlet with her fingers.
It burst into flame.
“He doesn’t want to see me!” Mathilde said, yet again.
Malachi looked at her from across the car’s passenger area. His features were not capable of fine expressions, but she had now known him long enough to see that he was not his usual distracted, more-or-less friendly self. Is he sad? Mathilde wondered.
Malachi cleared his throat. “You are right. He doesn’t want to see anyone. Not you, not me, not even his parents. It’s been a month since the party, he’s been home from the hospital in Charleston for two weeks—though why they kept him that long is a mystery, for all the good they were doing. And all that time he’s insisted on being left alone, hiding away in the rooms they’ve set up for him off the kitchens.”
Mathilde asked, “Why isn’t he in his bedroom?”
Malachi looked away from her. “Do you remember Mr. Taylor, the architect who designs the buildings for Witherspoon Holdings?”
Mathilde shrugged. She was sure she’d met the man at some function or another, but didn’t remember him specifically among all Malachi’s colleagues.
“Mr. Taylor was at the party and saw them take Theodorus out when he was still … transforming. The Witherspoons took him into their confidence when they realized they were going to have to make changes to their house. He told them that he isn’t sure that the second floor will support Theodorus’s weight.”
Malachi had been vague about the final details of Theodorus’s card turning. Mathilde had been there at the beginning, of course, when the boy suddenly lurched over and cried out in pain, and began sweating profusely. She had run downstairs to find her father or Mrs. Witherspoon, anyone really, and in the ensuing commotion hadn’t been allowed back in Theodorus’s presence.
“What is the dark wood from Thailand?” she asked.
Malachi looked at her sharply, but not in confusion. No matter what anyone ever said or did in his presence, Mathilde had never seen Malachi react in confusion about anything. “What are you asking me?”
“The statue of the elephant in the hall outside of Theodorus’s room,” she answered. “He told me once that when his parents brought it back from Thailand they had to have part of the roof removed and hire a crane to lower it into the house. He told me it weighs over a thousand pounds. So the second floor will support that much weight, won’t it?”
They reached the familiar iron gates. Carl was standing beside the gatehouse, clipboard in hand.
“Teak,” said Malachi. Then, as Carl waved them through without stopping the car, “The dark wood from Thailand is teak.”
Mathilde had never been in the warren of rooms behind the main kitchen of the Witherspoon house. They constituted their own wing, and Mathilde thought she may have overheard once that some of the people who worked for Theodorus’s parents actually lived in them. Or had, she supposed, because now, it was clear nobody lived there. Nobody “natural,” at least.
The parts of the ground floor of the Witherspoon house Mathilde knew were all high ceilings and hardwood floors, where it wasn’t even higher ceilings and tiled or even marble floors. Once, when an elaborate plan of Theodorus’s involving a slingshot and a model airplane had caused a bit of damage, Mathilde had been lectured alongside her friend about the differences between plaster and wood crown molding, and how the first required the services of a master craftsman to repair. Mathilde had been genuinely sorry for her part in the incident, but happy to learn about hand-built molds. She liked the phrase master craftsman.
She realized, looking where the walls of the rooms where Theodorus now lived met the low ceilings, thinking about how there was no crown molding of either plaster or wood there, that she had been standing in the doorway for quite some time. She took a deep breath.
“Theodorus?” she called.
There was no answer. She looked back into the kitchen, where Malachi was talking to the Witherspoons. Malachi saw her watching them, but no encouraging expression came across his face. He didn’t gesture for her to go on. After the briefest glance, he looked away.
She walked through the room, which had been stripped down to the floorboards. There was no furniture, no curtains hung across the single window, even the carpet had been taken up. An open door, draped in a heavy sheet of plastic, led deeper into the rooms.
She pushed through the plastic and found herself in a hallway where more of the sheeting hung from every wall and lay stretched across the floor. The doors off the hallway had all been removed. Plastic sheeting, everywhere. And something else, pools and trails of some glistening substance that Mathilde carefully stepped around and over as she walked down the hall.
“Theodorus?”
Something moved behind the door farthest down the hall. Something massive.
“Go away.”
Mathilde did not recognize the voice. It was deep and gurgling, liquid somehow.
“It’s me,” she said. C’est moi, she thought.
“I know it’s you. But I’m not me. Not anymore. Go away. Please.”
Mathilde remembered the pamphlet burning on the table in Malachi’s dining room. She wondered now if she should have read it. “I am a joker, too, Theodorus. I don’t care what you look like.”
“You’re barely a joker at all. Your skin is red, that’s it. You have legs. You’re normal-sized.”
Mathilde thought for a moment, then said, “I am very small. Is it a bad thing to be large?”
She would never know whether he pulled the sheeting away just then, or if it gave way by happenstance, some cruel coincidence, the way that most coincidences in the lives of jokers were cruel. But it di
d give way, in a tumult of noise, the plastic folding down, the tacks that had held it to the ceiling and the doorframe pinging as they flew free. One of the tacks landed at her feet, coming to rest atop one of the pools of glistening not-quite-liquid.
It rolled around for a moment, then came to a stop with its sharpened point down, piercing the jellied substance. The point broke the surface, and the pool opened and swallowed the pin into its milky interior.
She looked up, and saw what her friend had become.
“He is a tremendous snail,” said Mathilde, her voice still ragged from crying.
Malachi, unusually, had seated himself next to her in the back of the limousine instead of across from her, so they both rode with their backs to the driver as they returned to the city. “He is,” he answered her. “And he is also a little boy.”
Mathilde bristled at that. “He is almost fourteen. He is not little. I mean, not even in the way you mean.”
Malachi nodded. “Yes, I suppose you are right. But if I am wrong to say he is a little boy, then you must see that you are wrong to say that he is a snail. He has arms and a face. And of course he has the same mind he always did.”
“He’s like a centaur,” said Mathilde. “Except that where a centaur has a horse’s body he has that giant whirling shell. And that…” She broke off, English and French both failing her.
“Foot. The bottom part of a snail’s body is called a foot. And yes, a centaur is an apt metaphor. They were great scholars and warriors, you know. Fierce in their devotion to the gods.”
“Do you think Theodorus is fierce?” asked Mathilde.
“I think he could be,” said Malachi.
Mathilde did not see Theodorus face-to-face again for weeks and weeks after that. But it was only a few days later that Malachi brought home the first of many notes.
“What is this written with?” she asked, holding the flexible sheet covered in large, scrawled letters. “What is it written on?”
Joker Moon Page 6