Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

  Would it work . . .

  I never tried. Depends on the circumstances.

  “Writing without paper,” she whispered again, releasing him. “A lot of lives might depend on it, George.” She pointed down to the Straight, down at the Doctoral Candidate. “Trouble,” she aid. “Fix it.”

  “Sure.” He clutched the whistle in sudden fear. “You will wait here, won’t you? I mean . . .”

  “I’ll be watching,” Calliope promised, truthfully. “Now you go on.”

  A third kiss to send him on his way, just like that. And it did not seem at all absurd or surprising, not after living for months with this strangest and most beautiful Lady, to go trooping down into some sort of confrontation of which he knew nothing, looking and feeling like Wild Bill Hickock with a dragon kite in his hands. He held the kite in front of him like a shield, Calliope’s last kiss still playing on his lips, and people got out of his way, the taste of her on his tongue, hands of the Tower Clock inching toward high noon.

  Writing without paper, George thought Sure. Easy.

  A few pebbles rattled beneath the soles of his sneakers, reminding him of spurs.

  IV.

  The police cordon gave the Doctoral Candidate and his red wagon a fifty-foot circle of breathing room so he wouldn’t get nervous. At the edge of this circle stood an assortment of Cornell Safety and Ithaca City Police, thirteen in all. There was also a police psychologist—whom the Doctoral Candidate refused to notice—but requests for a bomb specialist and a Special Weapons team had so far gone unanswered.

  Despite the fact that the digital timer was clearly visible—00:20:22, it now read—and despite the obvious implication of the radiation stickers the Doctoral Candidate had plastered all over his invention, a surprising number of people had decided to hang out and see what happened. The Bohemians had gone so far as to throw together an Apocalypse Picnic on the grassy knoll above the Campus Store. Lion-Heart watched the action through a pair of opera glasses, sipped Midori from a shot glass, and arranged a chain bet as to whether they’d all be vaporized or not. Each Bohemian made one bet that they would, and another that they wouldn’t, the individual bets forming a chain. If they were all still alive in twenty-one minutes, they would pass a five-dollar bill around in a circle.

  “Gonna make it rain!” the Doctoral Candidate screamed, shaking the lightning rod. “Make it rain fire, see if I don’t!”

  He had been saying more or less the same thing, with little variation, for the past thirty minutes. He strutted about, sometimes getting a good distance away from his wagon and his digital toy, but in the hand that did not hold the lightning rod he clutched what looked suspiciously like a remote control transmitter, the button on it a traditional panic red. It was just a guess, since he had not bothered to explain his device or his motives, but it seemed likely that pressing the button would end the countdown prematurely, clicking the timer right to zero.

  “We can’t just shoot him,” Doubleday said, sounding disappointed.

  “Can’t reason with him, either,” sniffed the police psychologist. “Not if he won’t even listen to me.”

  “God, God . . .” Nattie Hollister stood with them too. The Chief of Police and a member of the University administration made it a quintet. “What are the odds,” asked the Chief, “that it’s a real nuke?”

  “Please,” the University official pooh-poohed, “this is an Ivy League institution. We don’t do nuclear weapons here.”

  “Be hard to get the plutonium,” suggested Nattie Hollister. “Unless they’ve got some in one of the labs up here. But even without real atomics, a Bomb’s still got a high-explosive trigger,and hell, I’m sure the chemistry labs up here have the ingredients for—”

  “But he’s Physics, not Chemistry, right?” said the Chief. He glanced at the University official. “That’s what you said.”

  “Still . . .” said Hollister.

  “ . . . we might not have a nuclear explosion,” Doubleday concluded for her, “but we could still have a high explosion. Which would be bad.”

  “Nineteen minutes.” The Chief of Police rubbed his palms together lightly. “Got to do something.”

  “Cordon’s not far enough back,” Hollister observed. “If it’s any kind of explosive . . .”

  “Where’s the damn Bomb Squad?” Doubleday wanted to know.

  “ ‘Scuse me.”

  “Huh?”

  They all turned; a sixth fellow had joined them. He wore the uniform of Cornell ROTC and had peach fuzz on his chin.

  “I can do this guy for you,” the ROTC offered.

  The Chief of Police narrowed his eyes. “What’s that?”

  The ROTC fingered a pin on his uniform. “Rifle team. Get me a gun and I can do this guy. Ever see Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter?"

  “Go home, bedwetter,” the Chief dismissed him. To the others he began: “Now I . . . hey! Hey, wait a minute!”

  Someone had broken through the cordon. No, not broken through—George had simply walked through, while the Safety officers nearest him happened to be looking the wrong way. By the time they noticed him he was well into the circle and headed for the Doctoral Candidate.

  “I’ll get him,” Doubleday said, fondling his nightstick.

  “No,” ordered the Chief, feeling a sudden compulsion. “No, hold on. . .”

  George kept walking, oddly confident, still feeling Calliope’s kiss. He no longer held the kite in front of him; he held it at his side, like a six-gun. Seeing the storyteller coming, the Doctoral Candidate broke off in mid-shout and turned to face him down.

  “Howdy,” George said, feeling not the least foolish, somehow, as he adjusted his cowboy hat. “Where’re you from, stranger? Originally, I mean.”

  The Doctoral Candidate flared his rain slicker and shook the tip of the lightning rod threateningly at George . . . but he did answer his question.

  “Chicago,” he said. Piglet and Tigger watched from the wagon. “lllinois.”

  The digital timer clicked over from 00:18:32 to 00:18:31. And the Tower Clock began to chime.

  High noon.

  V.

  Lion-Heart adjusted his opera glasses, watching the play with interest.

  “What the hell are you up to, George?”

  “Ten bucks says it’s interesting,” offered the Top.

  “What’s your name?” George asked the Doctoral Candidate. The Candidate flared his rain slicker again.

  “Christopher Robin,” he said.

  George nodded, indicating the stuffed animals. “Where’s Pooh?”

  “Pooh is home in bed,” Christopher Robin replied, beginning to sound impatient. “He has a social disease.”

  “Sure he does. And what’s that thing you’re holding?”

  The impatience backed off a bit. “It’s a lightning rod.” He shook the satchel. “I’m a seller of lightning rods.”

  “Oh, Je-sus,” cried the police psychologist. “He’s read Bradbury! I hate it when they’ve read Bradbury!” The Chief of Police gave him a look.

  “So what’s your name?” Christopher Robin asked George jabbing the lightning rod at him. “Eh?”

  George smiled in sudden inspiration. “What if I told you I was A. A. Milne? You being Christopher Robin, you’d have to do what I said. I’d have written you.”

  “No, you didn’t write me.” Sounding disturbed at the prospect.

  “Are you sure? Would you bet everything you had on it . . . Christopher?”

  “I don’t like you,” Christopher Robin warned. “And you’re no cowboy, either.”

  “True enough. Maybe you’re not Christopher Robin, either.”

  “Hey, you watch it!” Angry, and also afraid. This time it was the remote control box he shook threateningly. “Don’t mess, I’m nuclear, buddy!”

  “Of course,” said George. “And you’re going to make it rain, right.”

  To himself he thought: I am being glib, I am actually being glib with a potentially dangerous huma
n being. And enjoying it. Maybe I’m as crazy as he is.

  But he did not feel crazy, or afraid, what he felt was Calliope’s kiss, a lightness in his head, and a strong sense of control. Very much like the control he’d felt on the day of the box kites when he was a boy; not quite as strong a control as he had over a written story, but close, and getting closer.

  Calliope, kissing him.

  The timer, ticking over: 00:15:09.

  Trouble. Fix it.

  “Tell you what I am,” George continued. He had spied the House of Cards out the corner of his eye and his mind toyed with the possibilities of it. “What I am, Christopher, is a professional kite-flyer. Yes, it’s true. And if you don’t simmer down and start behaving right now, well, I’m just going to have to fly this kite of mine.”

  “No.” A sliver of real panic.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Yes I can.”

  “There’s no wind!” Jabbing, jabbing with the lightning rod. “You can’t fly a kite with no wind, that’s a rule!”

  George looked sideways at the sky. Holding the kite in one hand and the spool of twine in the other, he turned in place. Once.

  “The kite’ll fly,” he promised. “If you can make it rain, I can make the wind blow. Fair is fair.” He turned in place again.

  “I hope someone’s videotaping this,” Lion-Heart said.

  “Don’t you do it!” Christopher Robin’s thumb hovered over the red button on the box. “Don’t you dare fly that kite!”

  “So what if he flies it?” Doubleday shook his head. “Can we please do something, Chief?”

  And George turned in place a third time. “Put the box down,” he said.

  “Oooooo, gonna make it rain, rain, rain—"

  “Oh shit!” said Doubleday.

  “Come on,” said George, and the wind did. It started as a whisper but immediately began to rise. One second, and the touch of the breeze caught the Doctoral Candidate’s breath in his throat, froze him with sudden fear, two seconds, stacks of undistributed Blue Zebra pamphlets began to scatter, three, the House of Cards shuddered, four, George’s cowboy hat tipped up, considered flying off, five, it did, six, the kite was straining against its string, seven, the wind was halfway to a gale.

  “Magic!” Z.Z. Top shouted, laughing. “Fucking magic, George!”

  “RAIN!” Christopher Robin bellowed. His thumb descended on the button; George gave the House of Cards an encouraging glance.

  A Card near the top bent under the wind force, causing the mock Trustee meeting to keel over. The cabbage head rolled free of its body, dropped four feet to where the DIVEST NOW! banner snapped forward like a slingshot.

  The cabbage flew, spinning, on a collision course.

  It struck the Doctoral Candidate on the wrist.

  The remote control box flew out of his hand, broke apart on the ground.

  The timer continued to count, 00:13:59 to 00:13:58.

  “No no no!” Christopher Robin cried, looking at the wreckage of his box. He felt a tug on his other hand; George had wrapped the kite string three full winds around the lightning rod and released it. The kite yanked it away, carried the metal rod up and over the top of the Campus Store, where it landed without injury among the Bohemians.

  “Damn you!” said Christopher Robir, “You’re ruining it! You’re ruining my celebrity time!” He drew another lightning rod from the satchel, this one sharp at the end and bearing an uncomfortable similarity to a shish kebab skewer. “Ruining it!”

  “Hey,” George said, and a gigantic Ace of Spades slapped the Doctoral Candidate in the head. He regained his balance and went for George with murder in his eye. But now the banner hit him, wrapped around his face, blinding him, turning him. With a last cry of “Ruining it!” he thrust forward with the lightning rod and impaled not George, but the thing in the wagon.

  “Oh shit!” Doubleday had time to say again inaudible beneath the wind, but there was no explosion, only the puncturing of radiation stickers and the crumbling of papier-mâché. The lightning rod went in with silken smoothness, and as the top poked out the far side it dislodged the digital timer. Attached to nothing except itself, the timer tumbled to the ground, knocking itself silly. OH:PO:OH, it began flashing steadily.

  The wind slacked off as Christopher Robin slid to the ground, bawling, “Ruined it,” he sobbed. “Ruined it.” The holes in his invention bled what appeared to be little amber beads; Piglet and Tigger were being buried.

  Jelly beans, George thought, as three Safety officers pounced on Christopher Robin. No danger after all, just jelly beans. He tasted one. Hunny.

  The Bohemians were on their feet and cheering; Z.Z. Top and Woodstock wrestled for possession of the lightning rod. The police, in particular the Chief, were eyeing George as if they wanted to arrest him or at least talk to him, but were afraid to try. Somewhere close a black-and-white mongrel dog was barking ecstatically. Everyone else, from the Blue Zebras to the police psychologist, looked as if someone had struck them over the head with a large board. Loaves and fishes would not have astounded them more.

  “Well,” George said, feeling tired. He rescued Piglet from the jelly beans, then took Tigger too; no one interfered with him. Giving Christopher Robin a parting nod he turned and gazed back up the slope to where he had left Calliope. Among all the people he could not spot her.

  “No problem.” He felt a little tickle of fear but that was all. He still had her reassurance, after all.

  You can be sure I wouldn’t leave without it even if I were planning to sneak out on you . . .

  Still searching for her, he reached up to his throat to touch the silver whistle she had given him.

  His hand closed on empty air.

  CALLIOPE EXITS

  She did not even go back to the house to collect her things. Her duffel bag lay packed and ready at the foot of Ezra Cornell’s statue. The wind screamed as she slung the bag over her shoulder, but it did not touch so much as a single hair on her head.

  “Poor George,” she whispered, crossing the Quad. “Poor George.”

  By now he had discovered her disappearance; the Hurt was beginning. As always she felt a certain regret at this, hut causing the Hurt was after all a large part of her Purpose. A long (but not infinite) string of broken hearts stretched out behind her, a similar (probably not infinite) string waited just ahead, that was the road on which she traveled, and her name was Lady Calliope.

  One more thing to be done before she resigned this town to memory. Moving rapidly under a darkening sky, she passed through North Campus and up Fraternity Row, coming in no time to the fortress-like Tolkien House. She did not wish to be seen and was not; none of the brothers were in sight of the front entrance as the Lady swept in, doors swinging open before her.

  She entered the ,Michel Delving .Mathom-Hole, the great hall in which the House artifacts were stored. Neat rows of glass cases, each containing a weapon or some other item, all taken from Tolkien’s Rings trilogy. All but one. The odd-man-out was dead center in the hall, its case seamless and unlabeled.

  It was a spearhead, some ten inches long and six wide, with a square socket for a shaft at its base. It had a long and mythic history, one that had never been chronicled by Tolkien or any other storyteller; for the past half century it had lain here, surrounded by a House that was itself drawn from myth.

  Etched on the flat of the spearhead was a red-tinged cross, and beneath it the inscription:

  FRACTOR DRACONIS.

  The glass case sprang open at her touch. She grasped the spearhead incautiously; its edge defined sharpness, but it could not cut her unless she desired it to. She slipped it into the folds of her cloak and left the hall.

  Down a corridor and into the obsidian elevator; she descended to the cellars. Not bothering to light a lamp, she made a beeline toward Lothlórien. Upon reaching the chasm she allowed herself a frivolity; breathing into her whistle, she scorned the stone bridge and treaded thin air
across the gulf.

  Through the stone doors, into the deserted Garden. A jeweled night sky glittered prettily above, but she headed for the part of the Garden where the trees grew thick and the sky could not be seen. Here she paused briefly to regard the Rubbermaid, which bided time beneath the branches of a dark oak.

  “Soon,” Calliope told the mannequin. “Soon.”

  She walked on, trees growing thicker and thicker, till all at once reality buckled. The trees thinned out again dramatically and she was no longer in the Garden at all but outside, halfway down The Hill, in The Boneyard. A few short yards ahead of her a plain white marble square lay flat against the ground, carved with a single word:

  PANDORA

  Selecting another oak tree, she brought out FRACTOR DRACONIS and threw it with a flick of her wrist, burying all but an inch of it in the wood. There it would remain until being drawn forth on the eve of the Ides of March.

  The wind had died down a good deal. Snowflakes were falling now from a sky of leaden grey, but Calliope ignored them. For only a moment more she paused, looking up at the crest of The Hill, giving a final thought to the Fool whose real trial had not even begun.

  “Best of luck, George,” she said, and blew town.

  GEORGE IN HELL

  I.

  “No, no, no!"

  George made his way through a yie ding crowd, the wind easing off, easing off. Luther ran up to him barking and leaping on his leg; at first George ignored him.

  How could she have retrieved the whistle from him? But no, that was a foolish question even for a fool. The real question was, could he still catch up with her? He did not think he could convince her to stay, if she had decided time had come round to leave, but maybe, if he could only catch her, he could still manage some sort of decent good-bye.

  Thinking this, George ceased ignoring the dog and sought to enlist its aid. “I need to track somebody,” he explained to it. “A woman. A beautiful woman. She was up there by the Tower just a few moments ago. Do you understand?”

  Luther did not, as a matter of fact, understand at all, though he realized through empathy that George wanted something from him, wanted it rather desperately. Literally overwhelmed by the miracle of the wind-summoning, Luther was all too willing to please, but uncertain what was required of him. He saw George gesturing urgently in the direction of the Clock Tower and concluded that the man wanted him to go hat way.