“That’s a boy!” Dr. Schoenberg strolled ahead. He sniffed the salty air. “What a splendid night.”
It was. The beach glittered under their feet, and the dark ocean stretched out endlessly beside them, joining up at some invisible nexus with the rich velvety blue of the sky. Webern thought about his dream as he walked. It almost did seem like mermaids might swim in these waters. He looked down at the cane in his hand and again thought of those shimmering scales, flashing away where he couldn’t follow.
Webern didn’t like to think of his mother very often, but seeing Nepenthe tonight, laid out as if for burial, had stirred up his memories. He tightened his grip on the cane and tried to turn his mind away from the first image he saw—the car crash, with its broken windshield shining in rubied splinters on the pavement, his mother’s dress, a bottomless pool of spilled green silk. He thought of Nepenthe’s burka, with its red stain spreading, and of the swords that crashed like lightning around that spitting fire. Maybe he put a curse on everyone he loved. Maybe he was cursed.
“Watch yourself, my boy!” Dr. Schoenberg grasped Webern’s arm just as he tripped over a hunk of driftwood. The cane tumbled into the sand.
“I’m sorry.” Webern tried to hold perfectly still, but he could feel himself swaying. “Jeez, I’m so sorry.”
“No matter, Bernie, no matter. Cruel Bacchus visits us all now and again.” Dr. Schoenberg picked up the cane with his free hand and snapped it shut. Webern stepped more carefully, staring down at his feet. They seemed very far away. “Don’t fret. We’ll have you well in no time. Did you know, my boy, that in Haiti they would cure your ails by poking thirteen pins into the cork of the offending bottle? Left, right. There, you have it now. In Assyria, they quaff crushed swallows’ beaks, mixed in a paste with myrrh. But back at camp, you may have to settle for strong coffee and an icepack. Whoa there!”
Webern narrowly avoided slipping on a beached jellyfish. Up ahead, the campsite was almost visible.
“We’re nearly there now, my boy,” Dr. Schoenberg said. He pointed with his wand. “The others will be so relieved. Hank was all for alerting the authorities, but I knew I could find you myself.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”
“Don’t be absurd. Would you have me leave you tossing in the surf?”
When Webern had started going outside late at night to practice his unicycle, his father just sat around in his bathrobe, staring at the TV, his feet resting on the wooden crate his gin bottles had come in. He never came out to make sure Webern was all right. He probably didn’t even notice that Webern was gone.
“Dr. Show, do you have any kids?”
“I’m afraid not, my boy.” A shadow crossed Schoenberg’s face, but just as quickly it disappeared. “I was not made for the pleasures of hearth and home. One must make sacrifices for one’s art, you know. Besides, our little company is a family of sorts, isn’t it? We look after one another.”
Back at the campsite, Explorer Hank sat beside the fire, poking at the flames with a stick. Ginger and Freddy slept curled together in a cardboard box beside him. When he saw Webern, he leapt up.
“Bernie! Where the heck did you go? You had us worried sick. The cats’ve been shedding like crazy.”
Webern shrugged. The warmth from the fire reminded him how soaked his clothes were. He moved a little closer to the blaze.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Well, you should be! I was all set to call the Coast Guard—”
Dr. Schoenberg gave Hank a stern look, and Hank stopped himself.
“It’s just a good thing you’re safe,” he finished. “But you should go see Nepenthe right away. She made me promise to wake her up when you got back.”
Dr. Schoenberg stretched. “Well, I think I’ll retire. Hank, will you prepare Webern some strong coffee? I think it would do his system good.”
Hank nodded, and Dr. Schoenberg strode away into the darkness. He always pitched his tent a ways away from the others.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” Hank said.
“Okay.” Webern took off his jacket, wrung it out, and put it back on. Hank kept standing there. “Thanks.”
“But you should see Nepenthe first. She’s in her tent.”
Webern had never been in her tent. “I heard you the first time.”
Hank chucked him under the chin. “Go get her, little lion.”
Nepenthe’s tent, a green half-egg, sat nearest to the campfire. Tonight, it looked dark and silent, but the canvas walls breathed in and out, in and out, as if it were a living creature. Webern reached to unzip the flap, then hesitated.
“Nepenthe?” he whispered. No one replied. But his voice came out so quiet, even he could hardly hear it. Webern sucked in his breath, then reached again for the zipper. If she was asleep, he’d leave right away.
Webern unzipped the flap as quietly as he could, then stepped inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust; the only light came from the moon, filtered through the green canvas walls. Webern looked around slowly.
On the floor, a half dozen fashion magazines lay open; from their moon-silver pages, models smiled up at him with a haunting desperation, their faces like unanswered love letters. Nepenthe’s trunk sat beside one wall, its leathery top strewn with veils and gloves, but also with limp brassieres and tubs of skin cream with curious names: Aqua Velva, Satina Smooth, Extra Pearl. A teddy bear with one black, shiny eye half sat, half lay on the corner of a spiral notebook.
Nepenthe herself reclined in the tent’s farthest corner, up to her elbows in the kiddy pool. Most of the ice cubes around her had melted; the few that remained had diminished into slivers of themselves. Nepenthe still wore her burka with its dark crimson stain, and the fabric floated around her like a lilypad, but her discarded veil lay draped over the side of the tub. In the dim light, her face, grey and rough though it was, looked oddly fragile, like the cracked faces of heroines painted on Italian frescoes. Her eyes were shut, and for a moment Webern thought she was asleep. But just as he began to back out through tent flap, she opened them.
“Bernie,” she said. Something in the way she said it amounted to an apology, a confession, and a question all at once. The word hung in the air between them for a long time. Nepenthe blinked; her emerald eyes sparkled, and with a slosh, she sat up straighter in her kiddy pool. “Bernie, you’re drenched.”
Webern never got back to sleep that night. Nepenthe sent him to the tent he shared with Al to change into dry clothes. When he came back out to the campfire, he found her waiting for him, wrapped in a blue blanket, holding two mugs of coffee. She’d put on a set of white butcher boy pyjamas, but no veil or gloves; even her feet were bare. He sat down next to her, and she draped the veil around both their shoulders.
“Aren’t you hot?” he asked, remembering what Brunhilde had said—her skin can’t breathe like a normal girl’s.
“Nah, I’m okay. You’re freezing.” She ran her hand over his. “Brr.”
“I’ll be fine. At least I’ve got dry clothes on, now.” Webern thought of the melting ice cubes. “Do you always sleep in the water?”
“I try not to. It ends up drying me out even more.” Nepenthe scratched the back of one hand. “But sometimes it’s the only way I can doze off, you know? At school I had a bunch of electric fans, but there’s no place to plug them in here.”
Webern took a mug from her and sipped his coffee. “Did you go to a boarding school?”
“All girls, too. Don’t remind me.” Nepenthe lit a clove. “Want one?”
“I’m good.” Webern watched her face in the flickering light. Fissures lined it like a palm. “Does it hurt when you smile?”
“Why all the questions, kiddo?” She wasn’t smiling now. “Am I really so strange?”
“You can ask me stuff, too. I didn’t mean it like an inquisition.”
“Great. Does it hurt when I do this?” Nepenthe punched his hump, not that hard, but with a closed fist. Webern rubbed it.
“Yeah, it hurts. Thanks a lot, Nepenthe.”
“You deserved it, you dope.” She held her crackled hands out toward the fire. “I just hate how people do that—ask me questions about my skin. Like that’s the ‘real me.’ Did you ever read that comic Undetectable Girl, Bernie?”
“Sounds familiar.” Webern conjured up the image: a translucent ghost-girl in a cape, perched on the observation deck of a skyscraper. “I was more into Space Ace Grin McCase.”
“Figures. Guys don’t like comics about women unless they’re tied to the railroad tracks or getting raped by Martian octopi—chauvinists. It’s a degraded art form anyway. I don’t know why we’re even talking about it.” Nepenthe stared down into her coffee cup, then took a drag from her clove instead. “But what I was going to say is, sometimes I pretend to be Undetectable Girl, when I’m out there in the ring. I look out at the audience, and I get this tingling feeling all over, like Marla Blaine does when she twists the jewel on her radiation pendant and starts disappearing. Because they can’t see me, you know. It’s just my skin.” She blew smoke out her nose like a dragon. “What a cliché, right? Sometimes I don’t even feel invisible. I feel like I’m not anywhere at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, come on. You never feel that way?”
Webern hesitated. “When I’m performing, it’s not really me—I mean, I guess sometimes I pretend I’m someone else, too.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Someone I used to know when I was a kid. A friend. He was funnier than I was—crazy, almost. He did things I could never do. Nothing scared him.”
“Whereas you’re a paranoiac who flees at the first sign of danger?”
“Exactly. Nice of you to remind me.”
“Why’d you run off like that anyway? Can’t you take a joke?”
“You upset me.”
“You upset me. Jesus God, Bernie.” Nepenthe looked away. “I didn’t mean to ruin your goddamn birthday.”
“You didn’t ruin it.” Webern looked at the sand between them—just a few inches, but it might as well have been a whole desert. He sipped his coffee again and watched Nepenthe smoke. Her hair was down, and now a chunk of it hung loose, covering the side of her face. Impulsively, he reached over and tucked it behind her ear. All of a sudden, there was no distance between them at all: Webern felt Nepenthe’s warm, rough face brush against his, and then just as quickly, it was gone.
Webern remembered little of what they said after that. They sat for hours under the blanket, but the words they spoke seemed far less important than their interlaced fingers and the places where their knees touched. Nepenthe read Webern a poem she’d written in honour of his birthday, but later he could only recall the poem’s shape, its hard sweetness like a green Jolly Rancher on her tongue. They talked about nothing, about the show and Webern’s act and if he would get a driver’s license now that he was sixteen. After a long time, they stopped talking at all. Nepenthe’s head fell to rest on Webern’s hump, and he left it there, feeling her breath come, slow and warm, in waves on his neck. It comforted him, but he wasn’t even close to sleeping. The feeling that surged through him reminded him of the excitement he’d once felt on the mornings of his birthdays—the secret knowledge that now there was nothing between him and what he’d waited for. It was only as the sun came up over the ocean that it occurred to him: his birthday was already over.
CHAPTER FIVE
Years before Webern’s accident, before he was even old enough to go to school, his mother read him picture books in the afternoons before she put him down for naps. Webern’s mother could barely stand to let sleep separate her from her little boy, and the picture books were a kind of procrastination, a way to hold off the lonely quiet of his dreams. She read him stories about dwarves and pirates and goblins and grails while he leaned against her, lured by her voice into the depths of the illustrations. In one picture, a frail boy and girl crept hand in hand through a night forest. The forest gleamed with eyes. Every time Webern looked at this illustration, he tried to count all of the eyes before his mother turned the page. Every time he failed.
Webern Bell was a solemn, methodical little boy, with an old man’s frown and a pale round face. Only his mother could coax him to grin, or tickle him into fits of giddy, toylike joy. Sometimes Webern even presented well-planned jokes for her approval.
“What did the cat say to the hammer, Mommy?”
“I don’t know Bernie, what?”
“Me-ow!”
Webern’s hair was slow to grow, so for the first three years of his life, his head was naked and shiny as a wigless china doll’s. This suited him, since his mother dressed him like a doll anyway. Webern wore sailor suits and cowboy shirts, bow ties and silk pyjamas. Later, when he learned to ride his bicycle around the neighbourhood, he started to come home with black eyes and bloody noses. Given the choice between her son’s face and his wardrobe, Webern’s mother chose to protect the former, but they both cried when he tried on his first pair of dungarees.
But when Webern was still too small to go to school, he spent all his days in the company of his mother, with no scabby little boys or sticky little girls to knock him down and spoil his nice clothes. In the mornings, he peeled himself from his sun-ripened bed and padded through the house. By this time of day, his father and sisters had already left for work and school, and the rooms were silent and wondrous. In his red robe and slippers, he felt like a little king. His mother stood at the kitchen stove in a ruffled apron, wearing pink high heels even though they were inside, and sizzled breakfast in a coal-black skillet. She listened to his dreams with gentle amazement. When Webern finished telling of yellow stars trapped in jelly jars and squirrels who slept in hammocks, of cold blue palaces carved from ice and a circus on a sailboat, she always explained, with barely contained excitement, what they would do that day.
On Webern’s fourth birthday, his mother took him downtown, to the toy store on the corner of Oak and Main. The store was part salesroom, part doll hospital, and Webern liked to look at the ceramic limbs, the coloured glass eyes, the tiny toupees and the vials of paints that the owner left scattered on his workbench, which resembled a messy operating table.
Webern and his mother jingled in the door. The toy doctor nodded to them from his perch behind the counter. With a pair of small, sharp scissors, he was amputating a cracked porcelain arm from a baby doll’s overstuffed body.
“Lovely day we’re having, eh, Mrs. Bell?” he said without raising his head. To help him with his work, he wore a miner’s cap. A bright light beamed down from his forehead onto the ceramic limb. “How’s sonny boy, there?”
“Oh, Bernie here’s fine. He just turned four today.”
“Well! You’re a big boy now, aren’tcha?”
“Bernie, sing Mr. Saul the song I taught you. Go ahead, don’t be shy.”
The toy doctor looked up with interest, and the light from his miner’s cap shone into Webern’s eyes. Webern retreated behind his mother’s legs. Today he wore a red beanie with a propeller on top, and he imagined it revolving faster and faster, carrying him up into the endless blue of the sky.
“M, ’n’ N, O, P,” he mumbled, reaching up for his mother’s hand. She squeezed his and smiled down proudly.
“Bernie’s learned the alphabet,” she explained.
“He’s a sly one, all right,” observed the toy doctor. He lobbed the doll arm toward a trash can. It shattered on the floor. “But I say, how do you like this weather we’ve been having, Mrs. Bell? Hot enough for ya?”
“It is unseasonable,” she agreed, fanning herself with one hand.
While the grown-ups talked, Webern slipped away to look at the toys. Most stores on Main Street had big picture windows and glaring ov
erhead lights, but cobwebby shadows draped the doll hospital even in the middle of the day. Webern rolled a red fire truck back and forth on a dusty shelf. He played with the marionettes until their strings tangled into impossible snarls. He stacked the geometrical coloured blocks to build a rainbow castle, and he wound up all the wind-up toys. These little metal creatures held a peculiar fascination for him. The seal slapped its grey flippers together; the monkey pedaled a tricycle; the fat cat slapped a coin into its mouth with one greedy paw. They were the best toys, really; the same gears that turned the hands of clocks moved their insides with a kind of life. Webern watched them for a long time. Then he snuck back to his favourite part of the store.
The toy doctor kept his miniatures in glass cases that hung from the wall and glowed like magic aquariums. These cases looked like tiny rooms; some even had rugs and wallpaper and little closed curtains where the windows would be. In the first room, the toy doctor had arranged a shrunken feast. Webern stood there on his tiptoes to see the three-tier wedding cake, the stripey bags of popcorn, the fat hamburgers, the martini glasses, and, in the centre of it all, the roast pig, splayed on a silver plate with a gumdrop in his mouth. The second room looked like a museum. On the walls, paintings the size of postage stamps—Whistler’s Mother, the Mona Lisa—hung beside a medieval tapestry, intricately woven to depict a unicorn and a satyr frolicking beside a well. But the third room was Webern’s favourite. This room looked like a little boy’s bedroom, and it was heaped with toys.
On the floor, an exploded jack-in-the-box craned his accordion neck over a battleground of tin soldiers, while nearby a wooden train derailed. Meanwhile, in a makeshift fort of blankets and pillows, teddy bears and rabbits conspired against a pair of arrogant robots, with stiff straight arms and orange light-bulb eyes. Tiddly-winks lay like confetti around an auto show of sleek race cars, and a rocking horse reared on its hind legs, eyes wild with excitement. On a disorderly shelf in the back of the room, picture books stacked and tilted upon each other, the titles on their spines already dimly familiar to Webern’s illiterate eye: RUMPLESTILTSKIN, PETER PAN, THE LONELY ISLAND. Above it all hung a painting of a clown balanced on a unicycle, spangled arms spread, harlequin suit sparkling and swirling like an impossible constellation.
Goldenland Past Dark Page 6