by Various
Jim let her go, and he didn’t watch her leave. He thought: I’m going to change out of this flowered shirt first chance I get.
He went over to the man in the rattan chair and said, “You know this guy, Gray? Gray. Turtle soup, singing. Come on, help me out here.”
“Gray, sure, sure,” the man said, standing up, shaking himself free of the babies. He took a utility knife out of his pocket and cut the twine from a bundle of thick books, then set them aside until he found the one he was looking for. The cover said simply Gray in big, blocky type.
Jim put the two babies in the rattan chair, and the other three immediately started crying, as though they’d caught it from the new arrivals. The proprietor looked flustered, but he handed the book to Jim.
It was heavy, the size of a big city phone book. Jim set it on the ground and flipped through pages of very small print, then found some pictures: a long-haired older man standing among alpacas, papier mâché alpacas on a stage, the same man kneeling by a stream, pointing with a stick at some turtles on a log.
“His biography,” the proprietor said.
Jim flipped to the back of the book. “A Window or a Small Box” was the title of the last chapter.
“Twenty cents,” the proprietor said. “But for you, my friend, who are so famous and so dashing, you can have that volume for free.”
“Laura!” Jim shouted after her.
The man went back to the rattan chair and leaned over the babies, whose cries had turned to a chorus of shrieking. He cooed at them, but they only got louder.
“Laura!” Jim said again.
She’d already disappeared around the corner. Jim closed the book, tucked it under his arm, and ran in the direction she’d gone. He thought he spotted her straw hat, bouncing above the downtown lunch hour crowd, but it was just the basket on a melon salesman’s head.
He shouted her name again, spinning in place. All around him, people went in and out of doors, and there were doors in everything, doors in the street, doors on second stories with ladders leading up to them, doors built into doors, doors in those doors.
“Laura!”
But she was gone, and he was lost, sweating as he wove through the crowd, the biography getting heavy under his arm.
* * *
“West or east?” he’d asked her one day. They were on a train that sped along the edge of a deep, river-hewn chasm. “I just want to know if we’re going west or east.”
“Sweetie,” she’d told him, squeezing his hand, “I don’t think they have west and east here.”
* * *
That night, Jim sat in a sculpture garden in what he thought must be the center of the city. There were statues of cats, of moons, of arches shaped like horseshoes. It reminded him of something.
“That cereal,” he said to the musician who was sharing his carafe of spiked Pow-Pow. “That breakfast cereal with all the little marshmallows in it!” But the musician just shook his head, and plucked a few notes on his zither while his two babies splashed in the fountain.
Jim used Gray’s biography for a pillow, and in the morning it was all he had, because someone had stolen his knapsack and his shoes while he slept.
* * *
Laura hadn’t gone more than a block from the newsstand before the goons got her.
She was so angry that she didn’t even see the black sedan until it pulled up to the curb, didn’t notice the smell of freshly cooked breakfast until the smell had engulfed her, until the swollen, gelatinous hands of her pursuers took her and dragged her into the car.
It was completely dark inside. The windows were no-way windows, tinted on both sides. But the engine roared, and the car veered and rattled, and somehow the driver was driving. The radio was on and tuned to something old-timey. The air was very cool, though Laura could feel the press of many bodies around her.
“You did the right thing, ditching that guy,” came the voice of the chief goon from the front passenger seat. “It never would have worked out between you two.”
“Take me back,” she said.
“Remember that day?” said the chief goon. “The house by the sea, the second time I saw you? Stay, I wanted to tell you. Just stay with me.”
She remembered: a cloudless afternoon, a dusty road out of town through tall grass, the ancient house on the high sea cliffs. The door was unlocked, and the retired colonel—the one they’d been told might know the way home—was dead or away or had never existed. She and Jim wandered countless bare rooms, dizzied by views of rock and wave and sky, until back in the entry hall they heard for the first time the sickening slosh of the goons’ arrival. Only the handsome one, the one with thick blond hair and a big grin, the one who’d told her weeks before how it would go, walked in on solid feet. She thought maybe she could reason with him, but instead she’d said to Jim, “We have to run,” and they ran, and kept running.
“Please,” she said to the goon now. “Please just tell me where we’re going.”
“Going? Darling, we’re already here. This is it.”
“This is what?”
“This is what happens when we catch you. We drive around together, and you say interesting things for as long as you can.”
The other goons were chuckling. There were more of them than could possibly fit inside that car: dozens, maybe. They could have filled a small theater.
“Keep it interesting, though. Because as soon as we get bored…”
More chuckling, and Laura’s instinct was to fight—to kick and punch and claw her way out of there—but she’d heard the doors lock, and she knew what had happened to Jim when he tried to fight them. So she swallowed that back and said, “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Snacks,” one of the goons said.
“Dinner,” another said.
“Talk about the constellations,” said a third.
“Zip it,” said the chief goon. “I want to hear about the wedding plans. I always find your wedding plans so interesting.”
“You hate it when I talk about my wedding plans,” Laura said.
“You’re right,” the chief goon said. “That was a trap.”
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Laura said, and then goons were hushing other goons, and one of them switched off the radio, and for a moment all she could hear was the noise of the car’s engine, which came as though from deep in the earth.
“The story is called ‘A Window or a Small Box,’ and it’s about some stones at the bottom of a stream—”
“Boring,” said one of the goons.
“Some stones,” she said, “that dreamed they were turtles.”
The same goon said, “Oooh,” and Laura could hear the slopping sound of him as he settled back into his seat.
“They dreamed that they were turtles, and the turtles swam in the waters of the stream, up above the rocks that dreamed them…”
* * *
Jim wandered until he came to the bus station. He sat for a while, watching the drivers raise their rope ladders and motor away. Then he walked over to a food stall and watched sausages turn under the heat lamps. He was hungry but his money was gone. He said to the boy in the stall, “Hey, can I have one of those sausages and not pay you for it?”
The boy said, “Sure,” and gave him one on a hard roll. Jim ate the sausage quickly, even though it was probably alpaca, and so far he’d managed to avoid eating alpaca.
He felt a little better after that. He stole a pen from a ticket booth window, then found a stack of leaflets advertising masks and baskets. The backs of the leaflets were blank. He made posters, drawing Laura’s face with his left hand. The picture looked like something a five-year-old would make, all squiggly lines and smudges. But with some practice he got her eyes right, and the length of her hair.
Lost, he wrote at the top of each sheet, and then at the bottom, Please tell Jim if you see her.
A janitor saw what he was doing and gave him a little pot of glue. Jim put the posters up all over the bus sta
tion, then went outside and stuck them under windshield wipers. He pasted them to telephone poles, to construction site barriers, to windows, to doors. When he was hungry, he found an open-air market, ordered a bowl of noodle soup, and asked if he could have it for free. The chef just shrugged and said, “Sure, Jim, it’s all yours.”
He made more signs. He wrote, Jim wants to marry this girl but he can’t find her! He plastered one neighborhood with them, took a bus to another neighborhood, plastered that one too. Sometimes people recognized him and cheered him on. A kid gave him a pair of nice blue sneakers with stars on them. They were too big, but he wore them anyway, letting them flop around as he walked.
By evening he was exhausted. He found a door in the base of an overpass, opened it, and went into the empty room on the other side. He curled up on the cement floor, said Laura’s name aloud to himself, and slept.
* * *
“… the boy whose job it was to count the turtles sat on the shore all day, eating sandwiches and keeping a tally on his abacus. Sometimes the turtles floated by on logs, and he wasn’t sure if he’d counted them or not, so he started painting white spots on their shells.”
“Why did he have to count the turtles?”
“Because there are people who want to know how many turtles there are. The real problem, though, was that no one had counted dream turtles before. Should they be counted like regular turtles? And what if the stones woke up? What would happen to the turtles then? The boy knew he needed some good advice, so he went to the girl who could predict the future.”
“Where did this story come from?”
“It’s a collaboration between me and a writer named Gray. Have you heard of Gray?”
They chuckled, and their chuckling sounded a little dangerous, so she kept talking.
“Now, the girl who could predict the future was making a lot of money, but she was sad and she didn’t know why. When the boy who counted turtles came to see her…”
* * *
Jim was awakened by a gentle knocking and the orange light of morning in his eyes. A woman stood in the doorway. She was short with short pale hair, and very pretty. “Mr. Jim?” she said. “Mr. Jim, I wonder if I could speak with you now?”
He knew her voice from the telephone. It was the biographer—no, the biographist.
“Um,” he said, sitting up.
She took a notebook and pen from her vest. “Are you sleeping in here, Mr. Jim? I never thought of that before. Anyone could just walk right into one of these rooms and take up residence!”
“It wasn’t locked.”
The woman leaned against the doorway as she laughed, her knees buckling slightly. “Of course it wasn’t!” she said. “Is this the real you, Mr. Jim? It is, it is. How can you keep it up?”
Jim realized that the biographist didn’t have a baby. She wasn’t from this city, and maybe not from this country. The thought dizzied him: other, stranger nations in this already too-strange place. “Listen,” he said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me. I’m not supposed to be famous. Back home, I’m pretty much just like everyone else.”
She wrote that down. “It must be a very funny place.”
Jim rubbed his cheeks. “You’re right,” he said. “It is a funny place.”
She knelt beside him and looked him in the eyes. Her seriousness made him feel serious as she asked, “And tell me, are you interested in the work and life of the author Gray?”
She tapped the biography with her pen. A dozen times yesterday Jim had nearly left the book behind: hard enough hanging all those posters with one hand. But he’d kept it, and last night he’d used it as a pillow again.
He flipped through the biography as the biographist watched. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I am very interested in the life and work of the author Gray.”
She was writing this down.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Jim said.
“I have never made a deal before. How do we make it?”
“I say what I’m going to do for you, and also what I expect you to do for me, and then we negotiate.”
She swayed back and forth a little, thinking. Then, “I am ready,” she said.
“I’m going to take you on as my biographist.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but listen. First you have to help me find Gray. That’s the deal. What do you think?”
“We negotiate now?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I accept!” she said, and hugged him. He put his arms around her and patted her back, twisting a little to keep them both from tumbling over.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Is this part of the negotiations?”
“No, I’m just wondering what your name is.”
“In that case,” she said, and tapped his nose with her pen, “I am not telling.”
She stood and walked out the door. He followed her. There was a bright yellow car parked beneath the overpass.
“Is this your car?” he asked.
“No, silly. It is Gray’s car. He sent me to find you.”
* * *
“… and just when the dream turtle soup was starting to get cold, the boy added more logs to the fire, and stirred the ladle in the cauldron. Turned out that a lot of people wanted to know what dream turtle soup tastes like, and a line had formed.”
“What does dream turtle soup taste like?”
“It tastes like regular turtle soup, except fizzier, and it evaporates on your tongue. The boy ladled the soup into wooden bowls, and everyone had a little, and they all thought it was very good. But the girl who could predict the future arrived late, and there wasn’t any left for her, and she told them about the bad things that were to come: the storm, and the battle, and the waking of the stones—”
“I hate this story,” said the chief goon. “It’s making me sad.”
“It’s not a happy story,” Laura said, “and it doesn’t turn out well.” She took a breath to keep her voice steady, but when she tried to speak again her voice wasn’t there at all. How long had she been in this car? How many hours, how many days? The silence, without her voice to break it, was terrible.
“Is that it, then?” the chief goon said.
“It,” she said, trying to make it a question but failing.
Grumbles, now, from the dozens of goons in the audience. She had never heard annoyance sound so menacing.
“I want Jim,” she said without thinking.
The grumbles got louder. She could feel the goons crowding close.
“Is that part of the story?” the chief goon said.
Even now, she thought, that monster in the front seat was enjoying this, enjoying his job. The goons loved getting angry, loved knowing that she would eventually disappoint them. Loved having the excuse they needed to snuff her out.
She choked back tears and said, “And the thing about this soup? Everyone who ate it was soon dreaming they were turtles, swimming in the stream and floating on logs in the sunlight…”
The goons settled in again, but as she told her story, she could tell they were no longer listening. She’d failed, somehow. The driver shifted gears, shifted direction. The car swayed, moving fast now, and Laura braced herself against the seat to keep upright, to keep herself from falling into one of those vile forms in the dark.
* * *
The biographist drove Jim into the hills, along winding roads choked nearly to the narrowness of a footpath by flowering bushes and vines. A gentle rain fell, but they kept the windows cracked. There were bottles of Purple Pow-Pow in a cooler in the back seat, and Jim helped himself. He had to hold the bottle between his legs while he twisted off the cap.
“Isn’t it good?” the biographist asked him.
“Tastes like medicine, but it reminds me of home,” Jim said.
An hour passed before they turned off the road and through an open wrought-iron gate. The biographist stopped the car there and let the engine idle. She gave Jim anoth
er serious look and said, “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Gray can be very mean to people. I heard he gave terrible, terrible presents to his own biographist. But you and me, Mr. Jim, we could keep on driving. Do you know how much coastline we have here? It just goes and goes.”
Jim twirled the purple liquid at the bottom of his bottle. He could say yes, he thought, and his own old world would never know the difference. The two of them would drive, and he would talk, and she would write things down and laugh, and who knows?
But he was already shaking his head. “I have to talk to him. I have to find out if he knows where Laura is, and if anything here adds up to anything else.”
She nodded, very solemn, and put the car back into gear. Neither of them spoke as they rode through more bushes and then out over a green meadow. The sun was clear of the clouds now, and the air was hot and damp. Beyond the fields, the broad valley was dotted here and there with houses and swimming pools.
But Jim didn’t have time to take in the view, because the biographist was driving the car straight into something that looked a lot like a carnival.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Mr. Jim,” she said sadly, “this is your wedding.”
* * *
Before he and Laura crossed over, Jim had tried hard to love planning their wedding. He read wedding magazines, and pitched his ideas, even the ones he knew Laura’s aunt wouldn’t go for. “Everybody has doves,” he said at dinner one night. “What would really liven things up is a falconry demonstration. And let’s have a medieval feast. People can eat with their hands and drink tankards of ale.”
He knew how far he could push things before Laura got upset, and he pushed things just that far, then stopped. The wedding he was talking about wasn’t a wedding at all, but a spectacle meant to make people scratch their heads. A ceremony that didn’t mean what it meant, because what it meant scared the hell out of him.
But nothing he’d come up with compared to what was underway here on this field in the hills.
Three great pavilions were festooned—festooned was the word—with streamers, blinking bulbs of glass, and giant glittery suns and moons. Beneath the tents and spilling out over the lawn were hundreds of revelers, people in suits and dresses but also in masks and wigs and corduroy clown costumes. People on stilts, or riding alpacas, or driving miniature cars with plastic eyes on the hoods and big furry wheels. Babies, painted bright colors and decorated with ribbon, rode laughing on shoulders or careened over the grass.