Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

Aurora nodded. And then, out of nowhere, a smile bloomed on her face, stretched wide but not quite making it to a laugh.

  “What?” said George.

  “Oh my . . . I just realized.”

  “Just realized what?”

  “Her name,” Aurora said. She seemed to have trouble getting the words out, as if she actually were laughing.

  “I don’t know her name,” said George.

  “I know it.”

  “You know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  The smile stretched so wide George feared it might snap and hit him in the eye. Aurora’s cheeks dimpled.

  “Juliet,” she finally managed to say. “Her name is Juliet.”

  “Hmmph!” grunted Rasputin.

  VI.

  Cathy Reinigen never did return from the bathroom. At some point she had simply evaporated; and it was funny, but George and Aurora felt no real compulsion to go looking for her. Instead, when Bijou and a few other free hands got up an impromptu rock jam at ten o’clock, they danced, and drank some more, and did not leave the bar until nearly closing time.

  Outside the fog had tightened like a corset, and they were completely isolated as they walked back onto campus. It did not really surprise either of them when a horse trotted by out front of the Straight, for by that time they were past the point where anything could seem very odd. The filly walked right up to George, nuzzling his neck like an old acquaintance.

  “She’s beautiful,” Aurora said, entranced. “Do you know her?”

  “No, I don’t think we’ve met.” George’s first thought was that she must belong to one of the Bohemians, but she wore no saddle—and he did not recognize her coloring, grey-olive coat with a midnight-black mane.

  “We should go for a ride,” Aurora suggested.

  “Hmmm?” The storyteller was momentarily distracted; he had reached up to stroke the horse’s head and discovered the mane had an unsettlingly familiar feel to it.

  “We should go for a ride,” repeated Aurora. She stepped up and patted the horse firmly. “That’d be all right with you, wouldn’t it, girl?”

  The horse whinnied in what Aurora took to be the affirmative; George

  struggled to catch up.

  “Did you say take a ride?” he asked.

  “Sure did.” Aurora took a step back and then swung herself effortlessly onto the horse’s bare back.

  “But this horse’s got no saddle,” George protested.

  “It’s all right—I'll show you how to bounce.”

  “You’ll show me . . . you’re saying you know how to drive this animal?”

  “Oh, come on, George,” said Aurora “I’m from Wisconsin, for God’s sake.”

  That seemed to settle things. She offered him a hand and he reached up to grab it, a few of the black mane-hairs still tangled between his fingers. As their palms contacted George felt a jolt, and like magic he was behind her on the horse, his arms locked around her waist

  The ride that followed seemed to take both forever and no time at all. They ranged far, perhaps as far as the caslern reaches of the Cornell Plantations and back, and George discovered through the rhythm of the horse and the woman that bareback was not such a terrible deal at all. They seemed to flow through the night, caught up in an enchantment that bore them along on hooves of ivory . . . it was a pleasant journey. More is the pity, then, that George could never remember later—nor could Aurora—just when and where they finished their ride and turned the horse loose again.

  Nor could either of them remember—and this was the real mystery how they came to be in the top of the Clock Tower. When the Chimesmaster shook them awake at quarter to seven the next morning they had no recollection of climbing the long stair (How had they gotten through the locked door at the bottom?). They did remember being there in the open belfry, the high point of a pinnacle that rose above a world wrapped in gauzy white. They remembered talking for what seemed an eternity, talking about love, and dream, and Christianity, and Abbot ,Mattachine, and a dozen other scattered topics. They even remembered things that could not have been, such as a little old man (truly little—he stood no more than six inches high) who seemed to watch them for a long time before being startled away when Aurora tried to speak to him.

  And what else happened?

  Did they kiss? Perhaps. Perhaps the fog rose up in the deepest part of the night, scaling the walls of the Tower, turning back the hands of the Clock to the last night in October. Perhaps they did kiss, reenacting the scene in the Garden, each knowing (and not knowing) that their arms held the wrong (and the right) partner.

  Did they love? No, probably not . . . not yet. George’s heart still belonged to Calliope, and Aurora’s (however mismatched it might seem) to Brian Garroway. But even where there is not true love there can still be the possibility of love, and that possibility, the knowledge of it, lingers long.

  How long did they embrace? Who could say? Time has little meaning in the fog, and even less in enchantment. All that is certain is that they talked for a time, and held each other for a time, and then a woman was shaking them awake with musician’s hands, to blink uncomfortably into the early sunlight.

  The day after Thanksgiving had dawned clear and cold; autumn was rapidly approaching its end.

  WINTER DRAWS NEAR

  Calliope returned, as promised, and for a brief while longer George’s life resumed its normal pattern, however normal that might be. But in his heart of hearts he felt his time with her drawing short, and he loved her all the more intensely for that, knowing neither the day nor the hour when she would be taken away from him, and worse still, not knowing what would happen afterwards. Mornings he awoke to find a chill wind blowing across The Hill from the west, rattling windowpanes and hinting at the approach of something unpleasant.

  Vanguard conservative William F Buckley blew in on that wind one cloudy da y. With a cold in his chest and a substantial lecturer’s fee in his pocket, he took the stage at Bailey Hall before a packed audience to give a two-hour talk. Naturally certain campus elements could not pass up this opportunity to infringe on the right of free speech; the front rows of the auditorium were packed with Cornell Marxists, and as Buckley approached the podium they set up a cry of “Fascist swine! Oink! Oink! Oink!” in no less than seven East Bloc language. Bohemian King Lion-Heart was infuriated by this; he had paid good capitalist money for the privilege of hearing Buckley out and then disagreeing with him. He raised his fist in defiance, and the Bohemains, Grey Ladies, and Blue Zebras began a counter-chant: “Bill! Bill! Bill!” The Young Republicans and reporters for the right-wing Cornell Review chimed in, perhaps not realizing, in their own fury, just who they were jumping into bed with. After a rousing chorus of “God Bless America,” the Communists were at last cowed into quietude. Looking dazed but not unhappy, Buckley launched into a long address concerning the death of liberalism, the rise of the new right, and the tattooing of AIDS victims.

  Wandering about the parking lot of Bailey after the end of the speech, Lion-Heart chanced to see Ragnarok driving off on his motorcycle. The King of Bohemia leaped to his horse and raced off in pursuit, nearly trampling Buckley, who stood among a press of admirers signing autographs. The chase was close at first-Ragnarok drove slowly, not noticing that he was being followed. Turning right on Tower Road, however, the Bohemian Minister of Defense glanced back over his shoulder, saw a purple-maned horse coming up fast, and gunned his throttle. Traffic forced him to slow up a moment later, but he made good his escape by doing a stunt-ride down the long stair that led behind and between Uris and lves Halls. Lion-Heart tried to urge his horse into a full-gallop pursuit and wound up getting thrown for his trouble.

  William Buckley wasn’t the only thing blowing in the wind as far as politics were concerned. Fueled by fresh bad news from Pretoria, the Blue Zebra Hooter Patrol stepped up protests against University stock holdings in companies doing business with South Africa. On the last day of classes
they gathered what allies they could and met out front of the Straight to build a symbolic House of Cards. They hoped to attract as many spectators as they could, but there were two attendees they never counted on.

  One was a seller of lightning rods with a Master’s Degree in Physics.

  The other was Stephen Titus George, storyteller, kite-flyer, Patron Saint of Daydreams, and friend to the wind, who was about to earn his Master’s Degree in the art of Writing without Paper.

  THE FOOL, THE WIND AND THE LIGHTNING ROD SELLER

  I.

  Of course a certain number of scientists have to go mad, just to keep the tradition alive.

  He was working on his Doctorate and he had a room of his own, which is an important thing for a man to have. Several levels beneath Clark Hall, the room was small, roughly cubical, and private. The door had three locks on it. Once upon a time he had been in ROTC, but even though he had quit the program the Army still loved him. The Army always loves Physics Majors; they build things.

  He had built something, all right. He sat in a swivel chair in the late hours of the morning spinning slowly around, looking at the things in his room, especially the thing. Nearest the door, a yellow rain slicker hung on a plain wooden coatrack. Then there was his desk, and on top of it a number of interesting items: a computer that helped him count; a clutch of stuffed animals; his lightning rods, black iron straight and true; a leather satchel to carry them in; and, in a plastic bottle that might have once contained aspirin, his Gobstoppers.

  He did not know where the Gobstoppers had come from, that memory had been misfiled somehow, though he suspected they were the gift of some woman, some Lady. He did know that they were wonderful. The Gobstoppers gave him dreams, wonderful dreams, and ideas; and they made him laugh, sometimes for very long periods. An irreplaceable treasure, he did not worry about running out of them, for the bottle never seemed to grow empty. He took them, and laughed, and had no fear.

  He took one now. A smile bloomed on his lips and he reached out to pet one of the animals.

  “Tigger,” he said, lifting the rag-stuffed toy out from between Pooh and Piglet. “Tigger, Tigger, Tigger.”

  Holding it, still petting it, he spun round again in his chair, focusing on the red wagon, the child’s wagon, that occupied one bare corner of the room. Bolted onto the back of the wagon was a crude tail of twisted hemp; painted on its side in white paint was the one word “Eeyore.” Sitting inside the wagon was the thing he had built.

  What the thing was exactly was hard to tell because it had been almost entirely covered by yellow and black stickers reading DANGER—RADIATION with the nuclear symbol stamped below the words. The thing was lumpy, halfway between a cylinder and a sphere, squat like a frog. A digital timer poked out of the sea of radiation stickers near the top.

  “Tigger,” the Doctoral Candidate—who had visions of being a lightning rod salesman as well as a Physicist—said, putting Tigger in the wagon too. Then he put Piglet next to Tigger, but left Pooh on his desk, looking forlorn. He bent to the digital timer, fiddled with it.

  Andy Warhol had said that there would come a day when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. But a Doctoral Candidate surely deserves more than the average mortal, so he gave himself a full hour, pressed a button to start the countdown.

  He put on his rain slicker and a pair of yellow boots produced from a drawer, double-checked a flyer (RALLY OUTSIDE THE STRAIGHT, 11:30 A.M.) and gave Pooh a parting pat on the head.

  “Gonna make it rain, Winnie” he said. Then he slung his satchel full of lightning rods over his shoulder and, pulling the red wagon behind him, he walked out, not even bothering to lock the door as he marched off to collect his share of celebrity.

  II.

  The weather outside was cold, snow promised but not yet delivered. Actually, with the air still as a whisper it was not a bad day for an outdoor rally, though only a fool would think of kite-flying on such a morning.

  The Blue Zebras had secured the main door of the Straight and set up a podium and microphone on the steps. They had put together an impressive selection of speakers and hoped to draw a respectable crowd even with final exams so close (like it or not, political consciousness on campus always tended to drop during the end-of-semester squeeze). But what most likely drew the largest number of semi-interested bystanders was not the list of speakers, or the informative pamphlets passed around before the start of the rally, but rather the House of Cards.

  The Cards were oversized, three-foot-long playing cards cut from stout cardboard, and because of what they symbolized they were all black Aces or Eights, the Dead Man’s Hand. One of the Zebras who had done time in the Architecture School had designed the House to look shaky without actually being so. About eight feet high overall, it was topped by an extra-large ace of spades on which had been set a scale-model conference table surrounded by figures representing the Cornell Trustees voting on a stock resolution. Below the neck the figures were normal, but their heads had been replaced by various fruits and vegetables. A cabbage head led the vote.

  “CORNELL’S INVESTMENT POLICY” read a cardboard plaque at the foot of the House. Higher up a small banner strung between two Eights shouted “DIVEST NOW!” Passersby both nodded and shook their heads at the structure, but most were intrigued enough to stay. A bipartisan crowd of nearly a hundred had gathered by the time eleven-thirty rolled around and Fantasy Dreadlock stepped to the mike. She studied the assembly, pleased at the variety she saw.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but it was precisely then that the Doctoral Candidate trundled into view with his wagon, clutching a lightning rod in one hand and screaming that he was going to make it rain.

  III.

  At ten to noon George was once again on the Arts Quad between the two statues, assembling a kite, the same kite, in fact, that he had first flown on a late day in August while a St. Bernard watched him. The Bernard was nowhere to be seen this morning; Calliope was at George’s shoulder, though, and he wouldn’t have noticed the dog anyway.

  They had risen early, Calliope announcing over breakfast that she wanted to see how George called the wind And so they had climbed The Hill, first taking a long walk downtown, a rare event for the usually house-bound couple. Calliope’s silver-threaded cloak had somehow sprouted a hood, partially hiding her face, though once she had caught the gaze of a passing biker. The fellow had gasped in awe and gone down in a crashing tumble of arms, legs, and Schwinn.

  “Now like I said,” George cold her, fitting the crosspieces into place, “the kites Uncle Erasmus and I had weren’t diamonds, they were box kites, huge rectangular things with tie-dyed cloth stretched on the frames. Erasmus said he loved box kites best because they looked like something that oughtn’t be able to fly at all . . . .”

  He went on, assembling and talking, caught up in the story of that childhood day, and he’d actually got the kite all together before realizing that Calliope was no longer beside him. Startled, he looked around, called her name, and found his gaze being drawn toward a press of people at the southwest corner of the Quad. Though it was the middle of a class period, a large body of frightened-looking people were outside and on the move, appearing along the asphalt between Olin and Uris Libraries, entering the Quad and crossing it to put some distance between themselves and whatever it was they left behind. An equally sizable group—curious rather than scared—moved in the opposite direction, trying to get a glimpse of what was up. Where the two groups came together they bottlenecked, became one struggling mob.

  Calliope stood just at the fringe of the bottleneck. She allowed George to see her, smiled at him, winked, and melted into the mass of people.

  “Hey,” George said. “Hey.”

  He dropped the kite and went after her, hurrying but still catching a few bits and pieces from the refugees who streamed past him. Two men in Zeta Psi blazers blipped in and out of earshot, one insisting to the other: “ . . . there’s no way, it can’t be, don’t worry . .
. there’s no way . . . .”

  Into the press of the crowd, shouting her name now, while others around shouted to know what was going on, someone had a what in front of the Straight? The storyteller was buffeted back and forth, turning, disoriented, until all at once two things happened.

  The first was that he broke through the bottleneck, found himself at the top of the slope looking down at the Straight, and more specifically at the Doctoral Candidate, who stood alone with his wagon inside a police cordon, while outside the cordon a diverse crowd of Cornellians tried to decide whether to run for the valleys or stay and watch.

  The second was that Calliope was behind him, laying her hands lightly on his shoulders, making him start.

  “God,” George said. “God, don’t ever do that.”

  “Relax, George.” She touched his neck in a way he liked and he did relax, leaning back into her, one hand clutching the whistle around his neck. Her breath in his ear.

  “What the hell, Calliope.” lie watched the scene out front of the Straight, some part of his mind trying to understand it. “What the hell, I thought you said you wanted to see how I called the wind.”

  “I do,” she assured him. She reached around from behind him, pressed an object into his hands. The kite. “I do, but here’s something more interesting.”

  People continued to struggle in both directions, but now no one bumped into them. No one blocked their view, either. George kept looking down the slope.

  “What’s happening here?” he asked.

  In answer she produced another object, set it on his head. Cowboy hat.

  “Looks like trouble in Dodge City,” Calliope said. “Town needs saving.”

  “What . . .”

  “Writing without paper,” she whispered, and kissed him twice. The first kiss was on the side of his neck, soft, electric. For the second he turned, caught it full on the lips, and after that he would have jumped from the Bell Tower if she’d asked him to.