(Giant prehistoric animal possibly poor example, unconvincing, revise? Haha, maybe he should take a couple of those fuzz-offs himself!)
Sunday
Therese wakes just before dawn, gasping for breath in the gray, glass-dust mist between sleeping and waking, surrounded by a static of phantoms. Can she capture some of them in her book? She starts to open the drawer where it is, but the whispering and flimmering is already winking out around her.
Just as well. She has been making high scores on the tests; she daren’t risk a relapse. She closes the drawer firmly and walks back and forth in her room to shake off the phantom remnants.
The noise of the night’s fireworks is still in her ears. The moon is there or not there, behind the metal shutters.
They’ve strongly suggested that she rest today. And that’s just what she plans to do. She’s calm enough now to fall back asleep, she thinks, and when she wakes up in the true day, she’ll be careful to take it easy. Maybe just lie around and play some games.
She still hasn’t seen any of the City, though—what will she tell her friends at home?
Oh, but she knows how it looks out there, they all know how it looks, beyond the hospital complex, out on the broad avenues . . .
The pealing of the bells comes faintly through the metal shutters, and when she closes her eyes she sees the sun shining, shining, the air all gold, and gold reflecting over the entire, glorious city from the Tower at its summit.
Streams of people, their arms laden with aromatic leaves and sprays of flowers, are coming from all the great houses and towers; processions pour through the boulevards to worship. The women are so beautiful—their wrists flash with jewels, and their legs gleam. Their long, pale hair flows down their backs.
At home her friends bow their heads and kneel. Julia has put a pretty Sunday ribbon in her black curls. Therese thinks: We are grateful.
Later today the others will take their weekly salaries to the mall, as they do every Sunday. Earrings, nail polish, maybe a new game, a T-shirt, a treat . . . What would she get if she could be with them?
Tomorrow a new week will begin, with more tests. And they say they’ll be able to measure exactly how well the drugs are working.
Therese opens the drawer in her table and surveys the tidy stack of her possessions. She tucks her book away on the bottom.
A little dry crumb clings to the cardboard box. Do her friends at home still remember her?
She unfolds her good dress, smoothing the soft fabric and admiring the sweet flowers printed on it. She puts it on and lies down again, falling toward sleep.
Yes, she can hear the doctor’s voice. Tree, he says.
Tree, she says, and a peaceful sensation radiates through her, as the word locks down.
But then for a moment she feels her unruly heart, her skin, her neurons—the secret language of her body—sending evidence of treachery to the sensors and dials. All around her, behind the wall of locked words, hums the vast, intractable, concealed conversation.
Coin, the doctor says.
She closes her ears and strains to shut out the noise.
Coin, she says. Tears of effort cloud her eyes.
Good, says the doctor. Mirror. His voice is growing softer and more insistent.
Mirror, she says—and her voice, too, is low and urgent.
Tower, the doctor says.
She takes a deep breath. Tower.
Fireworks, the doctor says.
In her sleep she struggles to scream, but she cannot make a sound.
Let’s try that one again, please, the doctor says: fireworks.
Fireworks, she says.
Moon, the doctor says . . .
Recalculating
“Who is that?” Adam asked, pointing at a boy on a swing set. Adam was helping, pasting photographs into an album at the kitchen table. His mother, rolling out a piecrust at the counter, paused to look.
“That’s Uncle Tommy,” she said. “Don’t you get flour on that.”
Next there were some grown-ups sitting on Gramma and Grampa’s couch. Next a lot of people in front of extra-tall corn, kids in front. “Is this Aunt Rosalie?”
“That’s Rosalie all right—look at the hair.”
“Are you there?”
His mother peered over at the snapshot he was studying. “That’s me. The smallest one, over on the end there, with the smocked dress and the pigtails.”
Adam considered the sad-looking little girl. He would have liked to pat the girl’s head, but now she was just a bitsy kernel inside his mother. “Smocked dress. Smocked dress,” he said, stacking the sounds up like the wooden blocks he used to play with. The tallest of the children was blurry. He must have moved. “Who is that boy, at the other end?”
“Let me—oh. That’s Phillip.”
“Phillip?”
“The oldest. Your Uncle Phillip.”
“Oh . . .” Adam studied the picture and reviewed the jungle of legs he’d clambered about in at the last family occasion, belonging to cousins and aunts and uncles and second cousins and great-aunts and great-uncles. “He was at Gramma and Grampa’s house on Easter?”
“You’ve never met him. He’s far away.”
“Is he older than Uncle Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“Is he older than Uncle Frank?”
“What did I say, Adam? Phillip’s the oldest. Are you going to put that into the album, or are you going to wear it out looking at it?”
Adam bent obediently over his task for a moment. “What was Uncle Phillip like when he was my age?
“I wouldn’t know,” his mother said. “I wasn’t born yet.”
“But . . . what was he like after you were born?”
She could tell Adam about Uncle Tommy when he was little if he wanted to know, she said, or about Uncle Frank or Aunt Rosalie or Aunt Hazel or Uncle Roy. But given the difference in their ages, she and her brother Phillip might as well have grown up in different households. She rotated the piecrust a severe quarter turn and bore down on it with the rolling pin. “He went away east to college, and he never came back, except once, when I was twelve, to visit. Daddy—Grandfather Jack—had expected him to take over the farm. Grandfather Jack was heartbroken. He never got over it, even though the rest of us stayed.”
“Oh. Did Grampa Jack yell at Uncle Phillip?”
“Grandfather Jack loved Phillip. We all did. Phillip was the oldest. Phillip was family.”
“Oh. Did he die?”
“Did who die? Of course not. What kind of question is that? He went away to live.”
“Oh.”
Adam kept his trusting gaze trained on his mother, while cautiously attempting, as if he were groping his way along a wall behind him, to locate a door. “Where did Uncle Phillip go away to live?” he said, with cagey nonchalance. “Did he go away to live in Des Moines?”
His mother frowned at her piecrust, now a near-perfect circle. “If Phillip lived in Des Moines, he would come to Easter. And Thanksgiving and Christmas. Phillip went to Europe.”
“Europe?”
“You know what Europe is, Adam. It’s across the ocean. It’s a continent, like America. We’ll look on the globe later.”
“Was Uncle Phillip a nice boy?”
“Nice? Well, generous, I suppose. Impractical.” He’d brought her a present, a sweater from France. But it hadn’t gone with any of her clothes, and she had never worn it.
“What—”Adam began. His mother swiveled around to him, terrifyingly, but then blinked and turned back to her piecrust. “He never did have his feet on the ground.” Grandmother Alice gave that thing away to someone who could use it. She would have outgrown it soon enough, anyway.
* * *
The pie was cooling on the ledge. The photographs were pasted carefully onto heavy pages. Adam wandered off into the newly harvested field and stretched out on his back, staring into the shining blue.
So, he had been waiting and waiting, and finally, one interes
ting thing had happened in his life—he had discovered a secret person. A person who had just slipped right out of the family pictures. The other boys and girls, who got caught by the pictures, had been turned into his mother and uncles and aunts, but his new Uncle Phillip was far away, beyond the ocean.
He sat up too quickly and closed his eyes to steady himself. Red suns flared across the darkness, and when he opened his eyes again, there was the combine, tiny, shearing off the billowing gold in the next field. The little toy figure driving was probably Uncle Frank.
Just past the combine was the curve of Adam’s great planet, Earth. It was a known fact that Earth was round and that it was spinning in the middle of the sky.
God had created Earth with its vast oceans, which Adam had seen pictures of, and its blue air. But all that spinning of Earth’s was what created the tides and the winds, and it was what created time, too.
Miss Brewer had explained. Earth was never still. It twirled like a lollipop on a stick, so that you looked at the sun and then you looked at the moon, and that was a day. But the lollipop was also swinging in a great, oval loop, like the rim of a platter, around the sun. It always went back right where it had started, but only when one whole year had been pushed out into space for good.
It made you dizzy to think of. Some people might be awake now on the other side of the planet, walking around in dark, upside-down Australia, and yet they would snap back onto Earth with every step they took, as if their feet were magnets. Because the real situation was, the world had no top or bottom, and he was just as upside down, right now in broad daylight, as those people in nighttime Australia were.
Miss Brewer had told them that they would never fall off Earth. But what if Miss Brewer was mistaken, and something went wrong? What if one of Earth’s parts got broken, the brakes, for example, and Earth started to spin faster—then would they all go flying off ? Would the oceans spill all over the place? Would the continent America bump into the continent Europe? Would day and night just be little strips—light dark light dark?
In fact, the wind was picking up this very instant. That was normal, of course . . . But oh—there went the stick of gum he was just about to unwrap!
Probably no one else was paying much attention, and he was the first to notice. Should he run inside and tell his mother? She would laugh at him, or say he was lying. And anyway, it was too late to do a thing about it—the blue above him was already deeper, more intense than it had been moments ago . . .
Adam clung to some bits of stubble and closed his eyes. Hang on, he thought, as the Earth gained speed and spun recklessly into night—hang on, hang on, hang on!
* * *
The cause of death was given as pneumonia. There was to be a memorial in London for people who had known and loved Phillip, but the funeral was back home, strictly for the nearest of kin, who for decades had seen him only in clippings sent by a vigilant cousin living in California. When he arrived in person, the coffin was, of course, already sealed. In his absence, over time, he had brought a certain amount of honor to the tiny town where he’d grown up, and he had become a source of pride by virtue of being admired elsewhere.
Phillip’s friend Vivian knew a bit about his parents, and she had written to them, urging them with just the right degree of warmth to come over for the memorial. They declined, saying that they were in poor health and couldn’t travel. But it seemed that there was one relative who was planning to attend—some nephew of Phillip’s named Adam, who had written her a brief note to say as much.
Squashed into his seat, streaming through the wonderful clouds for the first time in his life, Adam recalled his childhood attempts to commune telepathically with his mysterious uncle, a hazy figure, radiant and beckoning, who saw the best in him, even when others shook their heads and sighed. Too bad he had never actually dared to write a letter . . .
Day streamed toward the airplane, the plane glided downward, Adam was fitted into flowing channels of people, a train collected then deposited him—improbable as it was—only a few blocks from his destination in a place called Chalk Farm, though it was actually part of London and not a farm at all. The couple—Indian, Adam conjectured—who ran the peculiar little hotel managed to scare up an iron, and he was able to reconstitute the shirt that his pack had turned into a wad.
And a good thing, too—he hadn’t anticipated the elegance of the occasion, he realized as he ascended the wide front steps of the hall where the memorial was to be held. He hadn’t anticipated anything. It was the end of May. He had just finished college, and his girlfriend had just broken up with him, as well, erasing quite a lot of his envisioned future. His graduate program wouldn’t start until fall, and the summer job he had rounded up in Cincinnati wasn’t to begin for three weeks. He did not mention the memorial to his parents when he called to tell them he had saved up enough to take a trip. Europe? His mother said, as if she’d never heard the word.
In the lobby Adam’s language floated softly around him, but refracted through the many accents, it sounded unfamiliar. In fact, the similarity between the exotic beings who had convened here and regular people seemed nominal. So many people, from so many different countries, each of whom looked so distinctive, so interesting, so supremely confident of his or her right to occupy space!
Say thank you, say it again, say excuse me, say please, say it louder, not that loud, say grace, don’t get in the lady’s way, ask for seconds it’s polite, don’t take so much, pay a call, bring a gift, don’t overstay your welcome—no one in his family had ever had that look! No one in his family had ever looked like they had the right to be anywhere at all!
Or perhaps his Uncle Phillip had. Adam parked himself next to a column in the corner of the lobby before going into the auditorium, just to gawk. Yes, it was as though aliens from an advanced civilization had cleverly disguised themselves as humans, in order to effect some purpose that had not yet been revealed to him.
Maybe some sort of practical joke. As he gazed around at the drifting crowd forming and re-forming into various configurations, one of the aliens detached herself and headed in his direction. “Hullo, great that you could make it, thanks so much, oh—Vivian,” she said, as he glanced over his shoulder for whomever she might be addressing.
“Vivian.” She pointed to herself. “You are Adam, aren’t you? Did you just get in today? You must be knackered.”
Her hair, a candidly artificial red, was chopped into a rough thatch that stood out, shocked, all around her head, though her small, pointy face seemed distantly concentrated, as though she were counting, trying to keep track of little rolling objects while she spoke.
So this was Vivian. Was she the practical joke? From the letter she’d written to his grandparents, he’d pictured his uncle’s girlfriend as a very proper sort of lady with several chins, but despite the little lines around her heavily made up, tilted green eyes and a slightly worn quality, she looked like a child dressed up in her mother’s chic suit and stiletto heels. A leggy child. The way she spoke was wonderful to his ears, and she wore a number of great big rings on her delicate, mobile hands.
“What,” she said.
Oh—he had been staring. “How did you recognize me?” he said.
There was a little frill of a laugh. “Well, frankly, darling, it’s like seeing a ghost. An old ghost. I mean, well, not old, obviously, a former—no . . . a what? A ghost of former times. Though, oh dear, I suppose all ghosts are that by definition, aren’t they. Anyway, come, we’ll do the rounds—people are wanting to meet you.”
Evidently, some of his uncle’s friends actually did want to meet him. Or at least to get a look at one of the relatives. He had been told without enthusiasm by his mother and his grandparents that he looked something like his uncle, but the people to whom Vivian was introducing him seemed to find the resemblance both startling and wonderful. The hair and eyes, several of them said—identical. Well, yes, those things of course—every single person in the family had the same shiny whe
at-colored hair and gray eyes, nothing special there . . . In the blur of murmured condolences, it would not have done, he felt, to mention that he had never in fact encountered his uncle.
A group of people, widening and narrowing gently, like a circlet of waves ringing a small island, surrounded a man of close to, Adam estimated, fifty. Olive skin, black hair, cream-colored suit, eyes as pale as a wolf’s . . . His bearing was painfully dignified, as if he were encased in a layer of some substance that inhibited his motions—shaking a hand, kissing a cheek . . . “Simon,” Vivian whispered to Adam.
“Who?” Adam whispered back, leaning in toward her.
She patted his hand. “Simon,” she whispered, a little more loudly.
“Ah!” Adam said. He felt himself flush, and for a moment his heart drummed.
They took seats in the auditorium, and a number of people, including Vivian, got up on the stage, one after another, to talk about his uncle or tell a story. The man named Simon introduced the event in a sentence or two but otherwise did not take part.
When his uncle died, Adam learned, building had already begun on his plans for a large museum gallery, entirely devoted to Asian and Islamic calligraphy, a passion of his. There was also a concert hall under construction, which he had ardently wished to see completed. But the project he had cared about most of all had been tabled. An experiment, apparently, very improbable sounding—a cluster of homes with turf on the roofs, and little windmill-type things, and reflectors to snare sunlight, and outlandish rigging so that water could be reused . . . interesting, of course, but—Adam realized he had been just about to think his mother’s awful word, “impractical.”
Four or five anecdotes diverted quiet sniffles into loud, grateful laughter. A small, unprepossessing man sang a few things—lieder, according to the program—accompanied by a piano, of a loveliness so distilled and potent that Adam felt he was being poisoned.
Your Duck Is My Duck Page 16