After Billy goes off to “hunt and gather,” Charter finds Dr. Zim’s address in the phone book, and after a fifteen-minute canter descends into a lilac grove and sees the house, white with olive trim, quiet, unlocked. He makes the rounds before stepping into a small, cool kitchen as white as a hen’s egg, its floors and counters gleaming. Everything in the house has a shine to it, is silvered with light, pristine. As he stands stricken with admiration in the kitchen, he thinks of all the many ways there are to live. The mole is happy underground, in its chamber carpeted with grass; the arctic fox dwells in mazes as vast as palaces; the weasel sleeps in deep hollows made by the roots of old trees; and the puffin will chase the rabbit from its den to claim it for himself. (There was a time in high school, before he ran off, when Charter read about different kinds of dwellings, and little else. He knows about the nests of wasps, the hives of bees, the places where the dung beetle hunkers down, the eagle, the carp. Writes Vanderloon: The house is man’s carapace, his pod, his shell, his coffin, or his cradle.)
But! The house of the ornithologist! There are books, hundreds of them, each one jacketed in white paper, its title carefully inked on the spine. A small white plastic radio gleams on the spotless kitchen counter—also white—the walls are white and every single surface is alive with light, clear of clutter, accessible. There is not a single web, nor ball of dust; there are no shadows!
Charter steps over to the ornithologist’s small refrigerator and pours himself a tall glass of orange juice. He drinks, rinses the glass, dries it carefully, and returns it to its shelf. And then he approaches the desk. It, too, is in order. There is a pale gray Olivetti with green keys, a stack of white paper, a clay mug full of sharpened pencils, a pen, and a bottle of ink. The ornithologist’s house! Everything appears to be levitating and illuminated. Everything, that is, except for a very sturdy pair of binoculars—Brunchhausers! At a powerful 7 x 50. He lifts them by their strap from the back of a chair and slips them over his head. They thump against his heart. He stands empowered and alone in the kitchen, washed by the afternoon sun. It occurs to him that he has built his life from fragments belonging to others. From things stolen, lost, or abandoned. That he has cobbled together a life in the company of things devoid of any meaning beyond their utility. That his life has no aesthetic unity. That there is no nobility to a life lived with such urgency as his, that he is no better than any hairy mammal carpeting its burrow with grass, and even now, in Billy’s safekeeping, he is a dubious boy, and solitary.
Charter thinks that although Billy’s house is perfectly accommodating, it has no uniqueness. Everything is replaceable, which is why it is an easy place for a serial interloper to set up shop. But the ornithologist’s house! It belongs to the ornithologist! Just as it belongs to the instant, the instant that is eternal and serene—
Charter fears he is only a stargazer who sees light from things no longer there. The ornithologist lives in the light of the moment in a way unfamiliar to Charter, perhaps unknowable to him, and this is terrifying! For a moment he hears a chiming in his head, a familiar vortex of sound, and falls into a hole, the unfathomable hole that exists between one instant and the next.
Somewhere above him the springs of a mattress creak and then someone—the ornithologist!—is moving around upstairs. Charter leaps as from a dream and takes off, veering at once in the direction of a path that rises toward the road to campus. He picks up speed and runs easily, joyfully, the Brunchhausers knocking at his chest: they give him purpose, they give him weight.
Cyavana! thinks Charter as he runs. Cyavana! Cloaked in earth and swarming with ants, his eyes blazing . . . Vanderloon writes: Cyavana in perfect disguise and isolation, relentlessly transgressive as he gazes upon the world. His looking is so like a hurricane in its intensity, it sends the world reeling, and when that world comes to rest it is no longer the same. It is irretrievably altered.
Back at Billy’s, Charter has taken up position in the shadows, the binoculars fixed to Asthma’s window. Dressed in a sheet, a peacock feather held to her temple with a barrette, she has enchanted herself and wheels around the tabletop like one possessed, setting up what appears to be a parade.
Vanderloon divides mankind into two constants: the ones who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible. Play, he writes, is a powerful form of magic—sometimes white, sometimes black. But always it is born of invention and intuition. Play is about becoming human, just as it is also about becoming a lion, a tugboat, a galloping stallion. The hallway that leads away from the child’s room and into the depths of the house is a river, a glacier, a bridge to the moon.
And now, the moment—and oh! it is prodigious!—leaps into wonderment; Asthma is making it snow. She is sowing fistfuls of silver confetti across the mirror lake, the woods, the park, the barbershop and Sphynx, the brass pyramid that—before it fell to the floor—was a cigarette lighter. Charter feels this snow touch his hands and face and knows the world is sacred. Space and time have dissolved, the window glass has dissolved. Charter and Asthma breathe the same air. Jenny beside them, using her scissors and glue.
He knows he will never get closer to life, that this moment is as close as he will get. The snow falls, star by star.
The smells of supper rise from the kitchen. Rich smells from a world light-years away. The radio is on and stupidly he thinks its sound travels at the speed of sound.
As Charter and Billy eat supper, Asthma talks to her toys. She says: “One understands animals. One understands because One is an animal. I know your hearts, my beloveds, and I know your minds. Because I, too, have an animal mind. Just the other day my intelligent friend Mr. Brightfellow said as much. Animals need a forest and they need a jungle. They need a varied and healthy diet, and a large number of bees are on their way, should arrive any minute, and they shall take over the bakery.”
She ducks under the table and pulls out a white cardboard box. The box contains two dozen Chinese bees made of gauze and painted cotton. They have bright bead eyes and their little legs and feet are wire.
One by one she takes the bees out of their box and places them in front of the bakery, in rows of six. Then she introduces them to the cheering crowd, all up to their knees, bellies, necks, wings in snow. But someone—who can it be?—begins to make a rumpus. He fears bees! He loathes bees! They are not animals! They fly around with daggers!
“Who dares speak such nonsense?” Asthma demands that the heckler show himself. Who else could it be but the eternally grinning crocodile, who is forever sitting on a barrel when everyone else is walking around (except for the ducks, who cannot walk but remain swimming night and day). Asthma plucks him from the crowd and sets him down in front of the bees.
“Tell the crocodile why you have come all this way to celebrate First Snow and stay here with us forever and ever!” The bees begin to buzz and to hum. (If you looked very closely, you would see that each carries a tiny musical instrument—a harmonica, zither, xylophone, castanets, and so on. One holds a baton.)
“Honey!” the bees sing. “Bee cake. Royal jelly!” The bees sing in harmony. Their music prestissimo!
That night, as Charter lies awake, Dr. Ash prowls her yard. “I am losing my hair,” she weeps quietly. “I am losing my mind.” The breeze carries her voice directly to him. Charter likes to think this world of his is just one in an infinite set of worlds, each unique, some darker than others, some brimming with light. (He wants access to such a world!) Because these worlds are material, and because matter is driven to transform itself—just as a fox is driven to bite, just as a dreamy boy is driven to dream high dreams . . . Once a world begins anything can happen.
He considers Asthma, as he always does. She is uniquely beautiful and strange, mutable, unlike any other in this world or any other; he thinks that she will never reappear once her time is over, or if she does, she will be unrecognizable.
“I had a tail once!” She had said this so merrily! Perha
ps there exists a parallel world in which another version of Asthma has kept her tail! A girl driven to thinking in riddles, who navigates the air, rising and falling like tumbleweed. He imagines a gilled girl, a celestial girl, a girl made of sound, a girl whose ribs cage the light.
The universe is immeasurable and so is a child’s promise. Immeasurable. Today she wore a blouse printed with sea horses. She skipped down the middle of the street as the air billowed above her and he stood at the kitchen sink, spellbound. And now, alone in his study, her room still and dark, he is as lonely as he has ever been. He wonders if and when he will once more sit beside her, her very own Brightfellow! Brightfellow, she has named him. He backs away and falls onto the bed, having eaten a meal of impossible implications: not only meat and potatoes, but gravy and Parker House rolls—having paid his way with a fantastic tale of a swamp people who sleep and fish among the roots of trees; who milk the stars for answers to questions small and large; who dream of serpents; who know nothing of debt, of success, or even of failure; whose only punishment is silence; who see musical notation in the rotation of the planets; who know nothing of insomnia but instead sleep like hens. Whose infants are all born with yellow hair.
The room is uncannily still. Just as he begins to careen into sleep, Dr. Ash’s voice rises and for an instant he hangs suspended between two worlds.
“Ah!” She says it loudly. “Rats.”
Just as sleep fully claims him, he idly wonders if his study might be made into a camera obscura, Asthma’s window views magnified and projected onto his back wall. But why dream ways of seeing her if he has now entered so effortlessly into her world? Why not simply stroll past her yard again tomorrow?
That night he sleeps as does the clam inside its shell. One would need a knife to pry him open.
Meanwhile, Billy files his nails at the sink. Before Charter’s arrival, he was in free fall. Now he bustles around with purpose. And Charter is brilliant, unexpectedly entertaining. What was it he had said? They sleep and fish among the roots of trees. They spend their lives in and around the water and never drown. That many are born albino . . . how mysterious! How marvelous!
But . . . what is that sound out by the Circle? Ah! It is Dr. Ash. What can possibly be wrong with her? Billy inspects his nails. They are perfect. But liver spots compromise the backs of his hands, hands that make him think of his wife. He is appalled that he had once touched her with pleasure. What could he possibly have been thinking? Better to caress an eel in the dark.
Outside, an owl whispers through the trees. And then everything is still, everyone sleeps . . . but not, not quite. Before the world goes silent, he hears Dr. Ash standing at her living room window and speaking. She is speaking to her house plant. “Why are you so green?” she asks. “Are you from Mars?” And she laughs.
“Brightfellow!” Asthma startles him. “What are you doing?”
Charter leaps to his feet. They are standing on a grassy embankment just above the pebble beach. The duck blind is leaping with flames.
“A small fire.” He says it gently, his voice and manner warm, his eyes wild with something like euphoria. “Just a small fire.” He pauses. “Asthma. Did you follow me?”
“You are not supposed to . . .” she answers evasively, and in confusion crouches beside him, her eyes on the flames.
“But isn’t it beautiful,” he says. “Do you see the blue roses, the black roses? And there,” he gestures to the air in front of them. “See how the air is unsettled and shimmering. See how it seems to be melting? As if it were glass . . .”
“Yes!” She claps her hands. “It is melting! Fires always smell good,” she decides.
“That’s another reason why.”
“Why?”
“Why I like them.”
“Is this a secret?” she asks. In silence they look on as the fire builds. They listen to it crack and roar and then watch as it falls in upon itself, quiets. After a time all that remains is a small heap of embers. The air smells of burning leaves and branches, of scorched earth and canvas, of moss and mold roasting. Everything is heightened.
“Yes,” Charter says at last.
“A fire,” Asthma tells him with an intensity that stirs him, “is just like a kaleidoscope. It’s always the same stuff moving around, and it’s always different.”
“Once I slept here,” he tells her, “Oh, it was a while ago. In those days I was very much alone.” He passes a stick of gum to her.
“I’m not allowed to chew gum,” Asthma says. “May I have two?” She tells him she knows about a fox den nearby. Charter pushes the embers around with a stick to cool them, breaking up what is left burning.
“Show me,” he says. He can see how the forest excites her. He can see that her hair needs washing and that her little cotton dress is stained with more than grass. He knows that in Blackie’s house, much is left undone. When they reach the den and he peers in, it’s the color of midnight. He smells fur. There are leaves and twigs scattered around, and one small bleached bone.
“Shh!” Asthma whispers just as he is about to speak. “She’s sleeping now.” He sees that she is flushed with excitement. Her knuckles are dirty and the little mole on her cheek is almost purple. This is the most beautiful day of his life. What was there to the world if not this?
“I don’t have worms,” Asthma tells him. And then with irritation, “Sometimes Blackie sees worms everywhere!”
“What was your day like?” Billy asks. He has served supper on the screen porch. A restful place, comfy. They sit in the early evening light, the smell of food from other houses mingling with that of Billy’s curry. Rich as a kingdom, the table is studded with little bowls: peanuts, yellow raisins, toasted coconut, chutney. Charter is radiant; he has never been happier. He cannot stop smiling.
“Well!” Billy returns his smile. “You’re in fine fettle.”
“Yes! I am . . . in fine fettle!” The phrase tickles him and he begins to laugh. It is fortunate Billy joins him, because Charter cannot stop laughing. He is swept up in it. As the curry cools in their bowls the two of them roar with laughter.
All around the Circle people are at supper. The two Rods have set up a grill; Pea Pod is whining about her bloody portion of porterhouse, and Blackie is scolding Asthma, who has taken her baked potato and charred piece of meat up into a tree. Charter catches a glimpse of her bare legs and feet dangling from either side of a branch.
“Asthma!” cries Blackie. “Come down from there and socialize!” The houses are illuminated, houses filled with numberless things. What would it be like, Charter wonders, to grow up in a house with rooms filled with things so ordinary as to be invisible until the moment one reaches for them out of habit?
Billy stretches and sighs. “Is there any time of day better than twilight?” he wonders aloud.
“None! Look! Goldie’s Rod is doing card tricks.”
“Goldie’s Rod. That’s funny. Charter? What have you unearthed today?” He litters his curry with nuts.
“They have many names for wind.”
“It’s windy!”
“Always. All the time. The island is more or less thoroughly, ceaselessly, raked with wind.”
“Raked!”
“Not a smooth surface anywhere. The vegetation is gnarled, hugs the ground; the leaves of things are small, hard as rubber. There is a plant, the Noola, that produces a large oily nut. They have to pound the shells with a heavy rock to break them open. They sing as they do this. They have songs for everything they do. They cook with Noola oil and rub their bodies with it. Everybody smells of Noola. They have a song for the moon’s rising—”
“And for love?”
Charter blushes.
“You haven’t told me all the names for the wind.”
“Ah. Well . . . there is the wind that brings the flies—”
“Hah! Flies are a problem, then?”
“Only in season.”
“And? I know! A Noola-whacking wind!”
“
Yes. That too.” Charter grins but for an instant fears he has been found out. But no; Billy continues:
“How good the air smells tonight. I wonder what it must be like to live among people who all smell like Noola! Does it get rancid?”
“You don’t notice after a while.”
“I had forgotten! You’ve been there!”
“Yes.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s a lovely, peaceable island where people never eat one another.”
“For heaven’s sake! Somehow it had not occurred to me—”
They sit on the porch for a time in silence. Night comes; it seems everyone around them has gone to bed except for Blackie, whose typewriter can be heard in the distance. Dr. Ash is nowhere to be seen; perhaps it is still too early for her to feel the full violence of her solitude. Only a cat moves in the grass.
“Puss! Puss!” Billy says to it. “Would you like a piece of curried fish?” But the cat ignores him and seeing something they cannot, dashes off after it.
“When autumn comes,” Billy says, “I’ll make cider. We’ll go to one of the farms and bring back a carload of apples. How does that sound?”
“Thank you,” Charter says, the full impact of his gratitude surging to his neck and face. Without thought he puts his hand on Billy’s knee.
“None of that,” says Billy, gently.
When Charter returns to his room, Asthma’s window is dark. As dark as a fox hole is dark. Shh, Asthma had whispered. She’s sleeping.
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