Alice started keeping a diary around the time she was nine years old, and by the time she was eleven had graduated to spiral notebooks that she carried everywhere. Like most girls that age, she was paranoid about people reading her innermost thoughts but couldn't afford a diary with a lock and key, especially not considering the fact that she filled up a new one every few weeks, no matter what the days and dates preprinted on the pages. So she had to devise another way to keep her thoughts secure, and started writing backwards. Right to left, mirror-image style. The idea at first was that she would hold the pages up to a mirror to read them, but after a little while she found it as easy to read backwards as it had become to write that way, and so she didn't bother. That she wrote almost exclusively in purple ink was just a question of aesthetics.
It wasn't until later that she discovered that Leonardo da Vinci had written backwards in his own journals, for much the same reason. And later still before Mr. Saenz told her all about how Lewis Carroll had been a temporal lobe epileptic, too, and that he'd written backwards in his notebooks, as well. When Saenz told her that Carroll had used only purple ink, it seemed like it must have been fate.
In any event, in the pages of her mirror-written, purple-inked notebooks, Alice frequently sketched the image of the eye over the city, along with her compulsive lists of television shows she hated, books she'd read, kids at her school who ignored her, and all of the places she would go if she were ever able to leave home. London was usually on this last list, but as an afterthought, far down the pecking order, somewhere after Disney World but before Six Flags Over Texas.
It wasn't until she'd seen a news story about tourist attractions in England, the night after her grandmother's funeral, that Alice knew anything about the London Eye, but as soon as she'd seen it on screen, she'd recognized it as the image from her episodes. Of course, by this point, she'd started thinking of them as visions, instead, but all the same. There was the giant eye above the city, just as she'd seen when she was seven and a half, and like she saw again her freshman year. And suddenly, Alice knew what one part of her vision, at least, was trying to tell her. She had to go to London. She had to go to the London Eye. And there, she hoped, she would find out what the rest of the vision meant. It was the only thing that made any sense at all.
Alice's arrival at the London Eye was something of an anticlimax. If she'd been expecting the heavens to open up and a host of angels to descend, she'd have been disappointed. Not that she had, of course. But still, something a little dramatic would have been nice.
Instead, she'd stood in one line to purchase her ticket—seven pounds, or about eleven dollars American—and then gone to stand in another line to wait her turn. And waited. And waited. And waited.
It was some hours before her turn came around at last, hours of shuffling forward slowly, with a pair of German tourists in hiking boots and brightly colored T-shirts in front of her, bandanas tied jauntily around their necks, and a group of London schoolchildren behind her, kept in line and more or less in control only by the sheer force of will of the teachers who were with them, one at either end of the group, merrily carrying on a conversation at the top of their lungs over the shouting of the kids, pausing occasionally to bark reprimands at this kid or that for cutting up or for stealing each other's action figures or whatnot. Finally, she mounted the ramp that zigzagged back and forth, carefully watched over by a guy in a uniform, but Alice couldn't tell if he was a cop or a security guard, not that it mattered. Then she and the German tourists and half of the school kids, accompanied by one of the teachers, were ushered into one of the glass and steel pods. They looked less like pillbugs up close, and more like some impossibly large lozenge. But more distressing was the fact that the things didn't stop moving. The wheel kept on turning, slowly but inexorably, and as the pods slid by the deck, the doors opened, the people on board jumped off, the people waiting on the deck jumped on, the doors closed, and the pod climbed back up into the sky.
Now Alice started to worry about falling. There was maybe an inch of daylight visible between the edge of the deck and the pod, so it wasn't likely that she could fall through, but if anyone could manage to do, it was Alice. Maybe she'd suddenly shrink down to the size of the action figure between one step and the next, and find herself plummeting through the gap and out of sight. She'd fall into the green-gray waters of the Thames, and that would be that.
But she didn't shrink to the size of an action figure, and she didn't fall through the gap but jumped on board the pod, and when the door slid shut behind her, she finally started breathing again, and her pulse started to slow, if gradually.
Then the wheel turned, and the pod climbed into the sky.
Alice thought about pictures she'd seen in books of medieval engravings of the wheel of fate, which never stopped turning. In the pictures there was always a king sitting at the top, thinking that he would never fall, and some poor bastard being crushed underneath. But the pictures also showed that some schemer was on the side of the wheel heading up, and some unfortunate soul was on the other side heading down. The lesson of the wheel was that it kept on turning, no matter what, and that today's king could be tomorrow's poor bastard crushed underneath. Which meant, by analogy, that Alice was on the way up, right? So what happened when she reached the top of the wheel? And, more worrying, what happened when she started to come down again?
As it happened, she needn't have worried. Nothing happened, not going up, not at the top, not coming back down. It took half an hour for the wheel to make a complete revolution and the pod door to slide back open again at the deck, but in all that time, all Alice could see was the city of London. And the German tourists and the half complement of school kids with their teacher. But mostly London.
No choir of angels. No pink light striking her forehead and imparting holy wisdom. No flock of ravens and no gem and no mysterious guy with the ice-chip blue eyes. No fate, no destiny, no message, no meaning.
The German tourists were first off the pod, eager to soldier on to some other tourist destination, and the teacher had to struggle to herd all of her charges off the pod. Alice was the last on board, standing at the edge of the pod, watching the deck slip slowly by. The people running the Eye kept shouting at her to step off and onto the deck, pointing urgently at all of the passengers waiting on the other side of the deck to get on, but Alice found herself frozen, unable to move.
Was she not on a mission? Not for God, or the Queen of Faerie, or space aliens, or future super computers? What if she didn't have some special destiny, but was only a mixed up eighteen-year-old runaway who was off her meds, confused and alone in a foreign country?
In the end, two of the attendants stepped into the pod, gently but firmly took hold of Alice's arms, and dragged her off onto the deck, just in time for the rest of the passengers to get on board. The attendants told Alice not to worry, as they ushered her back to the ground, saying that it happens from time to time, that people get a bit locked up trying to get off the wheel. But Alice knew better. She wanted to tell them that just as the wheel of fate never stopped spinning, no one could ever get off, not really. No one got off alive. But she was pretty sure that they wouldn't understand.
Alice had a few hundred bucks in cash, converted into British monopoly money. Assuming that her mother hadn't cut off her AmEx and her ATM, she could always use plastic, but even if the accounts were still active there was a chance that her mother could use the transactions to trace her whereabouts and send the police after her, so Alice didn't want to try the cards unless it was absolutely necessary.
Alice figured she probably had enough to stay in a hostel somewhere for a while. Her Frommer's didn't list any, just hotels and beds & breakfasts and the like, presumably because a hostel would be beneath the dignity of anyone traveling London on eighty-five dollars a day, but Alice was reasonably sure she could find an affordable one, if she looked. Then again, the drinking age in England was eighteen, and she could just as easily spend her rem
aining money on drinks at a bar. She hadn't had a drink since she was almost sixteen, not since the accident, the one that no one at school liked to talk about.
Maybe it was time to start drinking again.
Alice was on her third drink at the pub, but it really wasn't helping matters any.
She'd had to stop drinking after the accident, for obvious reasons, but also because she went back on her meds. She'd stopped taking her medication originally when she was almost fifteen and about to start high school because she'd started drinking, and alcohol interfered with the medication and made her sick all the time. She'd be trucking along, having a few drinks with her new friends, and all of a sudden she'd feel dizzy, her stomach upset, and then she'd vomit everywhere. Nancy and the others had all just assumed she couldn't hold her liquor and teased her mercilessly. She hadn't told them about her episodes, of course, or about the accident—the first once, since Nancy was still alive and the second one hadn't happened yet—or about the medication. She'd just tried to grin as she cleaned the vomit off her chin and clothes, and decided then and there to stop taking the little salmon-colored pills altogether. When, a few weeks later, she still hadn't had any more seizures, she figured she'd been cured. She even joked to herself, in purple-inked mirror-writing, that it was the wine coolers and lite beer and rum that had cured her.
Then, of course, there'd been another episode, another seizure, and that had caused the accident, and with Nancy gone suddenly the other kids didn't feel like hanging out with her anymore, and no one else at the school much wanted to talk to her either, not that they ever had, and so Alice had been pretty much on her own. She'd stopped drinking, started going to counseling and group sessions, gone back on her medications, and that was that. She concentrated on her schoolwork, started getting A's and high B's in her Latin and math and science classes, spent her nights and weekends watching movies and old TV shows instead of socializing, did mazes and crossword puzzles, and basically turned into a geek.
Then her grandmother had gotten sick and told her that she'd been wrong all those years before and that her episodes weren't demonic possession but messages from God. And then her grandmother had died, and the London Eye was on television, and that was that. They were messages, and visions, and Alice had packed up her backpack and emptied her bank account and run away. Technically, she was sure, she wasn't really a runaway, since she was eighteen and legally able to make decisions for herself. But she was still in high school, and now technically truant from summer school—to make up for the days she missed sitting with her grandmother, this last spring—so she was sure her mother could make a convincing case to the authorities, if need be.
She hoped that drinking might help. It wasn't as if she was going to be driving again any time soon. Not only were the steering wheels all on the wrong sides of the cars and the cars on the wrong sides of the roads, but Alice didn't have a driver's license, not even an American one. The Department of Public Safety apparently frowned on handing out licenses to kids who'd been involved in vehicular manslaughter before they even took a driver's education class, so it didn't seem likely she'd be getting one any time soon.
So Alice sat at the bar and ordered a drink, and when she finished that one, she ordered another, and another. It wasn't a bar, as near as she could tell, but a “pub,” at least according to Frommer's, but Alice was hard pressed to tell the difference. Maybe it was the fact that the place sold fried fish with fries on greasy wax paper, inexplicably served with frozen peas, which she'd never heard of any bar doing.
Alice wasn't sure what she was drinking. She hadn't exactly been a connoisseur when she was a drinker. Nancy and the others were more interested in being drunk than drinking, per se, and anything that worked was fine with them. Cheap wine coolers, warm cans of lite beer, bottles of fortified wine, rum mixed with generic colas, whatever they could get their hands on. Whatever the bartender was serving—or publican, she supposed—wasn't anything she'd had before. She'd started by ordering the same as the person just before her in line, and ended up with something the color of hot chocolate with a frothy white head. It was a little heavy for her tastes, though her lips were pleasantly numb by the time she finished. Then she saw a woman order something a little lighter in color, and tried that, instead. It was a bit more her speed. Then she ordered something called a lager, which just looked like beer, to her, and tasted about how it looked.
There was a television in the pub, over the bar, and while Alice tried to drink her way to numb oblivion, she watched it. She didn't have any particular interest in what was on, but televisions screens are like magnets for eyes, and when one is turned on in your field of vision, it's hard to look away. It was all sports of some kind, soccer or, as they called it over here, football. Alice didn't care much for sports, not for American football or the kind the rest of the world played. The game wrapped up, and there was a brief news story about a music festival going on in some place called Glastonbury. There were a couple of quick-edited shots of hippies setting up tents and crowds of people with their shirts off, dancing in mud, bands on stage, and so on. It looked like Lollapalooza turned up to eleven.
The Glastonbury story sparked some controversy in the pub. Alice was sitting at the end of the bar, minding her own business, and there were a group of guys sitting in a booth a short distance away. The place had been pretty empty when Alice came in, sometime just past noon, but as the afternoon wore on it had filled up slowly. There were four guys sitting at the booth, between the ages of maybe twenty years old and fifty, and they looked like regular office workers, just like guys in polo shirts and khaki pants Alice used to see all over Austin. It was Friday afternoon, and it looked like the guys had taken off work early and had been quickly making up for lost time. They'd come in while Alice was on her second drink and had already finished off their fourth rounds.
One of the office guys, who looked to be about twenty-five and who wore a bright orange shirt and blue tie, said that he had originally planned to go to the Glastonbury Festival but that it had just gotten too commercial since the New Age Travellers were kicked out, and so he'd decided not to go. Another, who seemed about the same age, expressed his disappointment that he wasn't going to be going, since he'd always wanted to see David Bowie, who was supposed to be performing on Sunday. Another said that he'd been the year before and been so out of his head on ecstasy that he didn't remember a thing, but that he'd have stayed straight for a chance to see Bowie play live. Then the oldest of the group, who was maybe fifty, said that the other three didn't know what they were talking about. He said that he'd been there in 1971 when Bowie played the festival the first time round, and that he could take Bowie or leave him. The one he'd really like to see on stage again was Iain Temple.
At which the other three pounced on him, verbally and metaphorically. Iain Temple? they said. The guy who owns the airline? And the music stores? And the line of clothing and men's fragrances and software and frozen gourmet entrees? That Iain Temple?
At which the older guy got his back up and started in on the younger guys’ fashion choices, and poor work ethic, and such like. From the way they talked, Alice assumed the guy had a position of some minor authority at whatever office employed them, the way he lorded it over the other three in the pub.
Then the television started showing an ad for something called Queer as Folk, and the conversation drifted on to other topics.
Alice was just starting her fourth drink, another lager, when it happened. One minute she was staring absent-mindedly up at the television screen, feeling miserable and sorry for herself, when she started smelling something burning. She'd just stubbed out a cigarette and thought for a second that it was still smoldering in the ashtray. But when the edges of her vision started to go white, she knew what was happening. She was having an episode. A vision. Whatever.
It was almost tiresome, really. She'd been off her meds for a week, ever since her grandmother's funeral, and though it had been several years since she'
d last had a seizure, nothing much had changed. First came the olfactory hallucination, a smell like something burning. Then the white light. Then Alice felt like she was falling. Or in free fall, perhaps. Weightless, mainly, but never hitting the ground. She heard indistinct voices that she almost but never quite was able to recognize, whispering things she could never manage to understand.
Then there it was again, the same cavalcade of images, the mix-and-match jumble of symbols that had featured in nearly every vision she'd had since she was seven and a half years old. The eye over the city. A flock of black birds in flight. The man with the ice-chip blue eyes, and the mirror-still water of the lake or pond. And the jewel.
And then, an eternity later, a moment later, the vision passed, and the world returned to her. Just not as she'd left it.
It took her a minute to work out what had changed. Her right hand was still wrapped around her pint glass, her left hand was on her stomach, and she caught herself licking her lips, like always. There was a weight across her shoulders and a warm presence on her right.
She turned her head, feeling a little crick in her neck, and there was the office guy in the orange shirt and blue tie sitting next to her, about to stick his tongue in her ear, his arm around her shoulders.
“The fuck?!” Alice lurched to the left as she swung her right arm back. She'd meant to push the guy away with her right hand, forgetting that it was presently holding her lager, and so as she launched off the stool her drink ended up all over the guy.
Alice fell off to the ground gracelessly, and as she lay sprawled on the grimy floor, the guy jumped up, knocking over his own stool, looking with horror at the sopping ruin of his already questionable shirt.
“What, are you mental?” the guy spat, red-faced. “You were gagging for it a second ago!”
Alice wasn't sure how long she'd been out, but it was bound to have been a couple of minutes at least. What had gone on while she'd been in crazyland? She climbed to her feet.
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