Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

  II.

  “I never knew my parents,” George began, assembling the kite as he spoke. “I grew up with my Uncle Erasmus. Erasmus was sort of the family black sheep because of his profession, but he was also the only one who’d take responsibility for a kid that wasn’t his. He was a sculptor, talented, high on ambition, though actually he made most of his money selling concrete animals, which you’d think wouldn’t be too profitable but hey, we were living in New York City. Three days a week he’d drive his van out from Queens to Manhattan, set up a table on some busy sidewalk, five dollars apiece for solid cement squirrels, chipmunks, pigeons—Urban Jungle Art, he called it. Most impractical souvenir I’ve ever heard of—who wants to lug a concrete pigeon around the sights all day?—but the tourists were crazy about them, especially the Southerners. Never took Erasmus more than three hours to sell out his entire stock, and then he’d come home and fill up the molds again, make another batch. Left him plenty of time to do the sculpture he really wanted to do, and we never went hungry.

  “He turned me on to the arts when I was still very young. ‘The thing to remember, George,’ he used to say, ‘is that artists are magical beings. They’re the only people other than the gods who can grant immortality.’

  “That got me psyched, you know? Everyone wants to be like God, at least until they reach puberty. For a while I tried sculpting, but it wasn’t really to my taste. Then one day I had to write a short story for a sixth-grade English competition, and something just clicked. I went and asked my Uncle if he’d mind my becoming an author, and he gave me his blessing, bought me a ballpoint pen for my very own. So I started writing, slowly and without much talent at first, but—”

  The Bernard raised his head and barked twice.

  “I’ll be getting to the lady in just a minute,” George promised. “Be patient. Now as I was about to say, my biggest problem in the beginning was that I was too content with my life. Writers need anxiety to draw on for inspiration; if everything’s going peachy, you’re sunk. Fortunately in my case, puberty came early.

  “In my sophomore year of high school, I fell absolutely and hopelessly in lust with a girl named Caterina Sesso. I’d like to say I fell in love with her, but I won’t lie to you: ‘lust’ is the honest term. She was an Italian, and in those days Italian girls were all the rage. Later on redheads came into vogue, and just now the fad is Asians, but in high school the state-of-the-art girlfriend was an Italian. All of which is racist and sexist as hell, but I’ve never actually met anyone who didn’t have a preference, have you?

  “Caterina was Italian, but she was also Catholic (the two sort of go together), which was a bad break for me. Catholic girls are all taught to avoid lust, and things were made even worse in my case because I came from a semi-Protestant background. I tried all the normal approaches and she refused to have anything to do with me. Then, after torturing myself over her for weeks on end, I sat down with my pen and wrote her a story. Twenty-three pages. And it was good, too—best thing I’d written up to that time. I typed it up, Xeroxed it, and gave a copy to Caterina.

  “Four months later, on my sixteenth birthday, she gave in and had sex with me.” (Here the Bernard barked again, and George nodded.) “I know. Surprised me too. It wasn’t just the story that did it, you understand, but that definitely opened the door, convinced her to give me the time of day. We went together for a while, and then the night I turned sixteen there was this party at my Uncle’s with all my friends. When that broke up around midnight, Caterina and I wandered over to Flushing Meadow Park. We sat and drank beer until two, and then we lay down underneath that big steel globe they built for the World’s Fair, and started making out, and just kept going.

  “Next thing we knew it was sunrise, and someone had come along and stolen the leftover beer.”

  The Bernard barked twice, questioningly.

  “What happened then? Well, for a week I couldn’t write a single word. Life was perfect, not a care in the world, so I had nothing to drive me. That problem solved itself quickly enough, though—after her next confession Caterina decided that we’d committed a mortal sin, and broke up with me.

  “I spent the next seven years, right up to today, trying to get back to that birthday night under the World’s Fair globe.”

  Bark.

  “Simple. My luck did a complete reverse. Maybe I broke a mirror without realizing it. All I know for certain is that every time I got near a woman after that I thought about how it’d been with Caterina and wound up trying too hard, scaring them off. But my writing style kept getting better and better, mostly from all the practice.

  “When I was seventeen a woman I’d never seen before ran up and kissed me on Fifth Avenue, then took off before I even knew what had happened; I went home and wrote my first published short story. Just before the end of high school I saw a redhead tooling around the neighborhood in a Corvette and The New Yorker paid me three hundred dollars for the result. And then I came here.

  “Sophomore year at Cornell I fell madly in lust again, this time with a Taiwanese punker. Incredible-looking woman. I wrote her a novel over Christmas vacation. Burned off four hundred pages in a month. I didn’t get to sleep with her, never even knew her name, but the book got published and it bestsold. So did the next two books . . .”

  The Bernard stood up and shook itself furiously.

  “Swear to God!” George told it. “Why would I lie to a dog? When I go home to Queens for visits my Uncle just smiles at me. ‘You sure took after me, didn’t you, George?’ he says. ‘It’s a good thing your father isn’t still around, or he’d probably accuse me of some funny business.’ I’m twenty-three years old, I have enough money to live off for the rest of my life, the critics like me, I’m graduated with extra honors, and now Cornell’s taken me on as a writer-in-residence. And all for the want of a steady girlfriend.”

  Wagging its tail, the dog licked George’s hand. Whined.

  “No,” said George. “Not unhappy. How can you be depressed in a world where a man makes a living selling concrete wildlife? Lonely, maybe. Sometimes. Restless all the time. But I have this theory, see, that Whoever’s in charge is setting me up for something big—Moby Dick, Part Two, with wheels, say, a novel to change the course of history—and once I get it done, the Editor will ease up and let me have sex again, maybe even fall in love for real. Only, after about a month of perfect bliss, He’ll turn around again and give me something else to be anxious about. . . .”

  The kite was now fully assembled. George held it up so the Bernard could see. It was a traditional diamond shape, with the head of a dragon painted on a white background, and red rays projecting out from the head. A red and black tail trailed from the bottom.

  “I just picked it up last night,” George said. “Let’s see how she flies, eh?”

  He stood up and the dog began to bark again. There was still not so much as a ghost of a breeze in the air.

  “I know, I know. Don’t you worry. I may not have much luck with women, but the wind and I are old lovers.”

  And while the Bernard looked on doubtfully, George stared up into the sky, as if searching for a familiar face there. He began to turn in place, holding the kite in one hand and a spool of heavy twine in the other, facing first west, then north, then east, then south. Three times around he turned, smiling all the while, as if casting a spell that was as amusing as it was powerful. In a sense he was casting a spell, though whether it was fueled by magic or coincidence he could never have said. All he knew was that it worked.

  He stopped turning and gazed deep into the face of the sky once more. “Come on,” George coaxed softly, and the wind began to blow. It came out of the west where it had been waiting all along, and lifted up the kite with unseen hands. The Bernard began barking furiously.

  “Something else, isn’t it? Scared the shit out of me the first time I did it. Now that I’m used to it, though, it’s kind of fun.”

  He stood and listened to the wind, the wind which pro
bably would have blown anyway but which never failed to come when he called, not since his Uncle Erasmus had taken him to fly his first kite when he was twelve.

  “Maybe it’s not so strange, eh?” he said. “Hell, in a book or a story I can make the wind blow just by typing a single sentence. And you figure the world, real life, that’s just another story, one that doesn’t need to be written down on paper.”

  George laughed and winked at the Bernard, while above them the kite soared higher and higher, a dragon in a diamond cage trying its wings for the first time.

  III.

  “George is feeling lonely again,” Zephyr observed from where she stood in the McGraw Tower belfry.

  “Is he?” her Grandfather Hobart said absently. Hobart was busy making his daily inspection of the chimes. “That’s nice.”

  “It’s a very optimistic lonely,” Zephyr added, “but still lonely.” She sighed and rested one hand comfortingly on the hilt of her sword, which was actually a two-inch stickpin that had been set into a miniature ivory handle. Zephyr too was a miniature, only a half-foot tall and invisible to human beings, save for the very drunk and the very wise. There were many names for her race—elf, gnome, faerie, Little People—but sprite was the common term. There were well over a thousand sprites living on The Hill, anonymously helping the humans run things.

  “I wish there was something I could do for him,” said Zephyr. It was part question, and when Hobart didn’t immediately offer any suggestions she whirled around, intending to be furious—but of course Hobart wasn’t the sort of person you could bring yourself to be furious with.

  “Grandfather!” she whined, settling for mock anger. “Are you listening to me?”

  “With one ear,” Hobart told her. “No offense, dear, but you’ve been repeating more or less the same thing for the past six months.”

  “Do you think it’s wrong of me?” Zephyr asked seriously.

  “To love a human being? No. If that were a crime, I’d be more guilty than you. I loved one too, in my time. Why do you think I’ve spent the past century taking care of these bells?” He looked affectionately at the chimes. “Dear sweet jenny McGraw. How I do miss her.”

  Zephyr leaned forward, interested. “Was she beautiful?”

  “To my eyes, at least. Not, mind you, as beautiful as your Grandmother Zee, but very close.”

  “Did she . . . did she ever see you?”

  “On her deathbed I think she might have. Consumption took her while she was away traveling the world; she came back to Ithaca to die. I was her most constant companion during her final days, more constant than her own husband. And toward the very end, I think, when she’d really begun to slip away, she seemed to take notice of me.”

  Hobart’s eyes grew distant, and a little sad.

  “That’s the problem with loving a human being,” he said. “Most of them can’t see you except in extreme circumstances, and even then they don’t always believe what they’re seeing. Dear Jenny . . . I’m almost sure she thought I was nothing more than a hallucination.”

  “I think George could see me,” said Zephyr. “I don’t think he’d have to be drunk or dying, either. He’s not crazy, but he . . . he has strong daydreams.”

  “Strong daydreams.” Hobart chuckled. “And what if this daydreamer could see you, what would you do then? You can’t consummate love with a giant, dear. Several times I tried to imagine what it might have been like between Jenny McGraw and myself, and the picture I got was rather embarrassing, to say the least. Some things really aren’t meant to be.”

  “But . . . if only there were something . . .”

  “As for that,” Hobart went on, “why do you feel you have to do anything for him? You say he’s lonely, but look. He’s laughing down there.”

  “But he was just talking to a dog. People never talk to animals unless they’re lonely.”

  “Your own father used to hold conversations with ferrets.”

  “Yes, but Father understood ferrets.”

  “Did he really? It always seemed to me that if he’d really understood them, he wouldn’t have wound up being eaten by one. But perhaps I’m just too old and muddleheaded to see the truth of it.”

  Zephyr lowered her eyes. “Now you’re making fun of me. You really do think I’m silly, don’t you?”

  “No more so than the rest of us,” Hobart assured her. “It’s just that the best you can hope to accomplish is to find George a human woman to fall in love with. But that’s a job best left to Fate. I can tell you from experience that a sprite meddling in the personal affairs of a human almost always brings bad luck.”

  “But we always—”

  “Personal affairs. There’s a difference between helping the University Administration keep its files straight and playing matchmaker. Meddling in that area causes more trouble than it’s worth, Zephyr. Ask Shakespeare if you don’t believe me.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “Let him handle his own business. He’s got the wind on his side; he’ll do all right. And once you fall in love again—with a sprite, this time—it won’t hurt nearly as much as it does now.”

  Hobart paused for emphasis, then added: “Puck’s been asking about you.”

  “Puck’s an idiot,” Zephyr said automatically.

  “Puck has his faults. He has his good points, too. You used to know that.”

  “Maybe I’m not the same as I used to be.”

  Hobart shrugged.

  “As you wish,” he said, knowing that there was no point in arguing. “But I can tell you honestly, finding Zee was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “The best thing,” Zephyr repeated. “But you still tend jenny McGraw’s chimes, don’t you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “When George leaves, I want to follow him in the glider. Is that all right?”

  “I suppose,” Hobart said with a sigh. “But he’ll probably go down to The Boneyard. I don’t want you in there, not even flying overhead.”

  “Fine. If he does go there I’ll just turn around and come back. I promise. OK?”

  “All right,” Hobart agreed, uneasily.

  He went back to his inspection of the chimes, while Zephyr stood at the edge of the open-air belfry, unmindful of the seventy-foot drop.

  “Grandfather Hobart?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s so bad about The Boneyard? What’s in there?”

  For a long time he didn’t answer.

  “Nightmares,” Hobart said finally. “Old nightmares.”

  IV.

  George stayed on the Quad for the better part of an hour. When he finally reeled in the kite and disassembled it, the wind did not stop. It blew steadily, summoning cloud after cloud until the sky was steely grey. The rain was much closer now.

  “Give me an hour,” George petitioned the clouds. “I want time for a walk.” He cocked his head as if listening for a reply, then put the pieces of the kite back into the Swiss Army bag and started heading back the way he had come. “So long, buddy,” George said to the St. Bernard, which had wandered back under the tree. “Thanks for your company.”

  As he passed Ezra Cornell he snapped another salute, smiling at the thought of the legend: it was said that if a true virgin passed between the Quad statues at precisely midnight, Ezra and Andrew would come to life and shake hands with each other. Oversized footprints painted on the path between the two statues paid tribute to the notion. But you’d have a hard time deciding what to do if I came by, wouldn’t you? George thought. Once as a teenager and then seven years of abstinence, a man’s virginity might spontaneously regenerate after all that time. Hell, some people develop a third set of teeth.

  Pondering this, George left the Arts Quad behind him and hurried down Libe Slope toward The Boneyard, while in the sky the clouds took a vote and decided to hold their water a little longer.

  V.

  The glider, an ancient contraption of pinewood and gossamer, was stored i
n a secret hangar in the Tower peak above the belfry. Zephyr reached it by means of a hidden ladder and staircase. At the top of the stairs she pulled a lever in the wall, setting in motion a group of counter-weights that opened the outer hangar doors.

  Sitting in the farthest recesses of the hangar, the glider looked about as aerodynamically sound as a wingéd sneaker. Designed to be as invisible as the sprites, the glider’s pinewood frame was anorexically thin, and the gossamer wings—woven from Midsummer’s Eve lake fog—shimmered only slightly even in the brightest daylight. The single passenger rode in a narrow sling suspended beneath the main body of the craft, controlling direction by pulling on two threads . . . but it was the wind that did most of the steering.

  Zephyr climbed into the sling without hesitation or fear. She loved to fly; it was certainly a more convenient method of transportation than walking or squirrelback. Why the great majority of sprites remained earthbound was a mystery to her.

  Puck did a lot of flying, she knew—though his was a more mechanical and less magical bent—but she purposely tried not to think about that now. She had refused to see or speak to Puck for months since she’d caught him fooling around with Saffron Dey inside one of the display cases in Uris Library. Coincidentally or not, her feelings for George had first surfaced at about that time.

  Zephyr launched the glider with a thought. Like George, she too was on intimate terms with the wind, and didn’t even have to bother spinning around to summon it. She merely called to it in her mind and a river of air flowed into the hangar, floating the glider gently out, like a cork leaving a bottle in slow motion. The hangar faced north, giving her a splendid view of the Quad as she entered the open air; then she banked to the right, descending in a series of wide spirals around the Tower.

  “Be careful of the weather!” Hobart shouted to her as she passed the level of the belfry. “And remember—stay away from The Boneyard!”

  Zephyr raised one hand to wave, not bothering to yell back that she’d understood, and then she was lower, circling the clock faces of the Tower. I love you, Grandfather, she thought, at the same time wishing that he wouldn’t worry about her so much. But old sprites seemed prone to worry, and at 172 years of age, Hobart was the oldest surviving sprite on The Hill (Zephyr, only 40, was just finishing adolescence), old enough to have seen action in the Great War of 1850 against Rasferret the Grub, the most terrible conflict in remembered history. Zephyr wished he would learn to relax.