I am a part of this, he thinks, taking it all in. A shadow among the many. Not sleeping in the library among boxes or in reeking cabinets or in the woods but in a bed big enough to sail the seas on, squeaky with soap, dined and wined (my ear bent out of shape but everything has its price).
Just before Jenny had been sent away she had told Stub: “We soon will all be mad, as mad as a person can be, as mad as you and I.” And Stub had said:
“I’m not mad! Little kids aren’t ever mad!”
“The maddest,” she had told him gently. “The maddest of all.”
Now that Asthma, Pea Pod, and all the brats have vanished into their houses for the night, Charter ponders what she meant. He thinks she meant this: a child knows nothing else, nothing but the madness that preys upon it relentlessly, the madness that is in the food it eats, the words it hears, the dreams that, having failed to protect it, turn upon it. He thinks that from afar Jenny has directed him to the very place he now stands. It is his task to be vigilant. To assure that Asthma will come through childhood unscathed. He makes a promise to Asthma and to himself. He makes a promise to Jenny.
Asthma’s room glows with light. Dressed in flannel pajamas illuminated with starfish, sea horses, porpoises, and fresh from her evening bath, she hovers above a ping-pong table forested with plastic pine trees and all the rest. Squinting, he can just make out her little earnest face orbiting the table; round and round she goes. He has seen the mirror pond up close, the Italian opera house; he has held an ivory elephant to his cheek, counted geese and sheep—and here’s the thing: It is she who gives a shape to the shapeless, the formless days, the lost, the fragmented days. Her face. The games she plays. Her voice calling out across the lawn. The noise the can makes when she gives it a kick; her scolding tones when Dickie or another of the brats aggravates her . . . all this makes it possible for him to breathe quietly, to get on with it—his life, such as it is. Her tiny frame, her wrists (like a bird’s), her sprawling tabletop town, her faded frocks, her mop of short hair, her gleeful laughter, her little buckled shoes . . .
Because before Asthma, his days were hollowed out as if by a spoon and he would enter them as a blind man enters an unknown hotel, tap-tapping across the threshold into the formless minutes and hours—and this before the night would steal up on him, the night with its own relentless demands. Cloaked in black feathers, his mouth full of clay, he would practice survival in the face of the incommensurable. But now!
He sees her moving in her own special way with her own special grace. And oh! The miracle! Asthma looks out—she always does this before going to sleep—for a glimpse of Peter Pan, an owl, a Martian, maybe a witch. And she tells them all: Protect me or let me be. Godless herself, this is the way Asthma prays each night: Protect me or let me be. Her mantra is now his own. Let me be as well, he says to the darkness. Let us both be. Tonight the things that bite and squall and snap and bark, fly from his mind and Charter is possessed by the best of the night. That is to say he sleeps.
But despite this sweet enchantment, he awakens in the dark hole of early morning—three o’clock, when once wolves were about, wild dogs. Often he awakens like this, his heart overleaping, and there is nothing to do but attend to the hour’s imperatives, abandon the bed, and move about. He enters the office, its eye on Asthma’s window, now darker than the sky, and it seems as he looks out that his heart, still pounding, is made of a muscled cable that reaches to that window and latches on, as a lamprey’s mouth latches on to the body of a fish. And he sits, immobile, as Asthma sleeps, the two of them stuck to the skin of the world as it spins. In this way Charter is no longer solitary but part of the fabric of things. He appreciates the night and its wandering points of light, its lawns turned the color of blackberry jelly, its gravel smoothed to tweed, its owls tearing at the throats of mice. He is bountiful with love.
But . . . what is this? Someone is out and about wandering the Circle all alone. Barely visible, her form is distinctive, and her movements recognizable. It is the beautiful, bewildered Dr. Ash, barefoot and wearing a silk kimono. She sits down beneath the tree that marks the Circle’s navel and rolls her forehead from knee to knee, back and forth, back and forth, her hair billowing from her scalp like smoke. He watches as she folds herself into a ball and remains there like that for a very long time.
This is what I have learned during the early morning vigils. Depending on one’s state of mind, the hours pass painfully slowly, like a cold clay moving beneath the placid surface of a river—or they collapse all of a sudden and there is the sun (!) rising in the east and one’s own head awkwardly resting on the top of an unfamiliar desk and the day has come and Dr. Ash is not to be seen and Billy is already under sail and I can smell the coffee . . .
Domestic life is his, unexpected and unprecedented. After an early breakfast, a new day unfolds. The brats have vanished and so he attends to the work at hand, the confection of a spurious dissertation, a marvelous creature of the mind, neither here nor there: a chimera, half fur, half feather. A thing feasible and resembling nothing else; a midnight blossom; an entire world in levitation; a thing both beaked and lipped . . .
He is looking at Ancient Roots and Ways, at Vanderloon’s eccentric sketches of Quetzalcoatl sitting on top of a volcano. He appears to be wearing a garment made of leopard skin. He is looking at the sun-god of Babylon rising from the world-mountain, lightning leaping from the flesh of his outstretched arms. Quetzalcoatl is wearing an extravagant pronged hat and appears to be holding the toothed jawbone of a crocodile. Charter dreams over the zodiac belonging to the ancient Hebrews, in which Cancer finds its roots in a flood so powerful it causes the world to spin backwards—just as a crab moves backwards.
And this evasive movement of the crab appeals to him immensely. It opens a way. And Charter sees just what it is he will write about. The solution to his dilemma burns into his consciousness the way a meteor burns into the earth’s atmosphere, blazing a trail. He will invent a people unknown to all but Vanderloon. A decision that is monumental, exciting, and irrational. There is no reason why he should do this. But he has spent his life in hiding, fearful of discovery. Perhaps he fears honest scholarship can only fail, appear vastly flawed to those he will likely one day encounter. He fears it is inevitable that sooner or later he will have to justify himself. He wishes he had paid more attention to Axel’s admonitions. Axel who was clearly distressed Stub had not yet read Coming of Age in Samoa. Axel who had once suggested that Stub had entered the study of Verner Vanderloon as others enter a religious order.
Yet in a moment Charter is off and running. He will invent the papers, notes, some rare editions unavailable but for Vanderloon’s own personal library, stowed away and moldering in boxes abandoned by the very institution he had devoted his life to, revealing or having revealed the mysteries of the human imagination to how many generations of eager minds.
Vision is one thing, Vanderloon had liked to say, and observation is another. When on Easter Island he had learned of the bird’s superiority over the fish, he understood in a flash what informed that entire culture. He saw that the Easter Islanders were themselves like raptors, snapping away at one another until there was nothing left. Easter Island, Vanderloon wrote in Rules of Rage, is the mirror of all that is wrong with a species that again and again snaps up the fish rather than attempt to understand it. Today Charter puzzles over this. He thinks he does not want to be either one. He wants to survive but not snap anybody up in the process. A hare is what he wants to be. The one that with a leap, disappears.
That evening when Billy hands him a slice of quiche, Charter is ready to speak about his dissertation.
“It is an unusual project,” he begins. He gazes at the quiche, gemmy with scallions, peppers, cubes of ham. “Perhaps you will find it odd . . .”
“No! No! Surely not!”
“Well, for one thing, Vanderloon is obscure. Unacknowledged. You must know that when he retired he was given one small pewter bowl—”
> “No! How dreadful! The OED is customary, or some rare volume. For the women perhaps a sterling-silver charger—”
“Charger?”
“A . . . shallow dish. A big one. But a small pewter bowl! How terrible! How is this possible?”
“Five people showed up at the dinner. The table was set for thirty.”
“No!”
“Yes. Yes! So . . . there is that.”
“I’m speechless. It is true I didn’t even go myself!”
“And, well, the material that interests me is obscure. I am reading unpublished and scattered notes. I am reading little-known publications, small editions, many bound in paper. It may be that much of this exists only in those boxes in the library. Some printed on paper of such poor quality it crumbles at the touch.”
“Fabulous! Charter! This is exciting!”
“But wait! It gets worse!”
“Worse!” Billy clasps his hands. “Worse! Wonderful! Please go on!”
“Much of my personal interest has to do with a small island, so small as to be ignored on most maps. And, well, I have been there—”
“You have! Are you saying you and Loon? No one else?”
“No one else. Which is why—”
“Yes! Yes! I understand! One might say the two of you belong to a very select club!”
“It goes deeper. Vanderloon is like a father.” At this Billy finds himself resentful of Vanderloon, jealous perhaps. “I owe him everything,” Charter continues. “Three years ago I read an article of his published in the New South Wales Observer. About the island. I decided at once to go. It was not easy to get there. I sailed alone.”
“My god!”
“The island is . . . untouched. Vanderloon, exemplary in his reticence, his rigor, his humility—”
“I had no idea!”
“—made friends there. They revealed—”
“Secrets!”
“Yes. All that is—in his words—unbeholdable—”
“Loon beheld!”
“The secret of an ancient, a virgin tradition.”
“Virgin, you say!”
“Untouched. Unbroken. Pristine.”
Any number of birds are performing on the branches. But for their bellies—these birds have white bellies just like some fish—they are a dirty brown. Dr. Ash thinks they look sorrowful. Sorrowful birds the colors of fish belly and dung. She thinks that if they wore vests they would be secondhand and knitted of cheap yarn.
It is ten o’clock in the morning and already the day is over. Beautiful Dr. Ash, her raven hair falling to her shoulders in clumps a recent lover had seized in his fists, is talking to a jade plant. All her love affairs end in disaster; they begin with a shimmer but before you know it everyone is sobbing and shuddering.
The wonderful things about Dr. Ash are her hair and her breasts, which are set high and far apart. Also her mind. She has a magnificent mind if you appreciate mathematics. (There are twelve people in the world who understand her when she speaks about what she knows best and loves the most.)
Recently she heard on the radio that plants communicate with people. She immediately drove to the florist in Ohneka and bought a jade plant. She thinks that living with a jade plant is like living with an obstinate introvert.
Charter sets off for the library, head high, freshly sudsed, caffeinated, having polished off a preposterous breakfast (his host warms the maple syrup and serves the French toast with a dollop of whipped cream). He cannot help himself but must take the Circle the long way so as to pass Asthma’s house. There at the edge of the lawn, just behind the low hedge, he finds her crouching beside a fallen log swarming with large black beetles as shiny as polished buttons, their one red queen moving dramatically among them. Asthma looks up and sees him.
“Who are you, anyway?” she asks.
“The . . . uh . . . Fulbright student,” he manages. “From next door.”
“That means you’re bright, then.” She says it solemnly. “And full of—”
“Don’t say I’m full of myself. I’m not. I’m full of French toast.”
“Why are you always poking around?”
“Am I?”
“What do they call you?”
“My name? You must mean my name?” She nods. Her eyes poke into his like two sharp twigs. “Charter.”
“Look at the beetles,” she demands. “Why is one so red?” He steps over the hedge and crouches beside her.
“She is their Papesse.”
“Papesse!” Asthma screams with laughter. “What does that mean?”
“It means a pope. But a female pope.”
“What’s a pope?”
“It doesn’t matter. It just means she’s important like a queen or empress.”
“A princess.”
“No. A queen.”
“Papesse sounds like princess.”
“It does.”
“What does she do?”
“She lays eggs.”
“Yuck!”
“Thousands.”
“Ew.”
“She mates with one of these fellows—” He points to the skittering mass of beetles.
“Fellows! Fellows? They aren’t fellows! They are beetles!” Asthma screams. “And then what happens?”
“She incubates the eggs and then finds the right chamber somewhere under the log and she lays them, and then in due time a thousand, who knows how many, baby beetles hatch—”
“But why? I mean: why are they here?”
“Why is anything here? Why is anyone here?” With all the delicacy he can muster he touches her heart with his finger.
“Because I want to be.” Asthma says it archly. “That’s why, Mr. Brightfellow.”
“Charter.”
“I’ll call you Brightfellow.”
“I have far too many names as it is.”
“When I name a thing it is the name it needs . . . Brightfellow. So there.”
“You win.”
“Tell me a story.”
How beautiful the world is, he thinks as he sits down beside her on the grass, the beetles fully engaged in their affairs, and in the trees above them all manner of birds.
“Do you have anything in mind?”
“Make it up, Brightfellow, please. From scratch.”
“There was once a planet,” he begins, “made entirely—”
“—of aspic.”
“Of aspic. It was a frangible planet—”
“Frangible?”
“I mean to say feeble. Not really well enough to orbit the sun.”
“It could not get too close to the sun, either.”
“No, but it did. Each summer its elbows melted.”
“Planets don’t have elbows!” Asthma trills delightedly. “Planets don’t have knees!”
“Planets made out of aspic have elbows and knees.”
“Do they have people?”
“People who live their lives on place mats that float.”
“Place mats! And they sleep under napkins.”
“I have slept under worse things myself.”
“Some look like saltshakers!”
“With heads like green olives. They are vociferous.”
“Big word, Brightfellow.”
“It means they talk all the time. Rather like you.”
“Hmm.” Asthma purses her lips in mock annoyance.
“And they are hirsute.”
“Hmm . . . Brightfellow . . .”
“Which means they are covered with hair.” Asthma shrieks. “And this . . . this dismays them.” Asthma roars with laughter.
At this moment Blackie appears on the front stoop and her voice hatchets into the day like the voices of the birds that go: Chirrup, CRACK! Chirrup, CRACK!
“I have to go.” Asthma knits her brows. “Blackie is taking me to the doctor.” She stands and wipes the grass from the beautiful upended porcelain cups of her knees.
“Asthma!” Blackie shouts. “Who is that?”
; “Brightfellow!” she shouts. “He’s moved into the Old Fart’s house across the street. He lives there!”
“Mind your language,” Blackie shouts. “And move your ass over here, Asthma.” Blackie waves at Charter. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she calls out, an afterthought, and walks to her car.
“I used to have a tail!” Asthma cries as she dashes off. “But I lost it in utero! Now,” she trills as she climbs into the car, “I have worms.”
Although the sky is brighter than it has ever been, evening comes. From within the Circle’s few squat screened radios, Ratmutterer’s voice roaches:
I don’t give a plucked hen, a plucked hen—if a faggot is a crackpot—if that dickhead doesn’t swill beet soup. I don’t give a scatophiliac’s fig; he can percolate on an orange crate in front of the universe in his birthday suit, so what? But if he sucks begonias, I don’t care if he’s Woody Woodpecker or Minnie Mouse—he needs to be smashed with a hammer.
Once upstairs, Charter sees Asthma enter her room and begin to play with her town and its little animals. He thinks that if he could be at play beside her, he would recover all that is lost, all that was taken from him—so long ago now—when Jenny was sent away and all the games they had played together were reduced to the worst feeling of absence, with all the beauties of the world contained within that absence. Later, when he lies in bed, he recalls the long walk he took alone in the winter’s snow to the madhouse on the hill. How he had asked for Jenny, had himself been asked for his name, his address. How the nice lady had asked, “Is Jenny not with you?” How when he walked to the door, sad and confused, he had seen the strangest-looking lady in the world pry her nostril with her tongue.
“Is she not with you? Is Jenny not with you?” This was how Jenny had been taken from him. Inexplicably and with a suddenness. When he had put the question to his mother, she had said: Because. Then, when pressed: Because Jenny was beyond the pale.
That night Charter dreams of the Hindu ascetic Cyavana, who was said to meditate within a hill of ants, fully submerged but for his eyes. Vanderloon writes that Cyavana’s eyes burned like embers, burned holes in the fabric of the days and the nights. When Charter awakens to the smell of bacon he thinks it is time he finds himself a good pair of binoculars. His fork full of scrambled eggs, he asks Billy over breakfast if there is someone who teaches ornithology. There is. Professor Zim. Timothy. A good sort. Something of a bird himself, trim and quick. But why? Owls, Charter says. There are so many. And the other birds. Much for study, I would think.
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