That I was losing the game was not the only reason I had wanted to be alone. I was hoping to be visited by a ghost: I thought I could feel someone halfway up my throat. Ghost-speaking without a spotter was forbidden, but I did not want the others to see how often and how hard I practiced. My mouth was just arranging itself into an old-fashioned shape when a whisper and a muffled laugh told me that I had been discovered. I crouched lower, screwing my feet into the loose leaves to find firm ground to push off from. Then I burst from under the bush like a jackrabbit, as the visiting spirit—for that is what it was—called out quite loudly and with surprising, but most unwelcome pertinence, “Little Bobby Black-bird sat upon a tree, singing to the pussy-cat, you can’t catch me!”
I followed this with a little mew of dismay, wholly my own, for in fact they could catch me, as I well knew, and give me a drubbing, too.
A little stream, amusingly called a river, took a semicircular bite out of the bottom of the playfield, swung wide around the Chapel, made an exploratory swipe at the back of the school, where several tall trees dropped leaves over a cutbank onto its rippling, spangled surface, then set off toward Cheesehill down a course choked with fallen trees. Eventually it dove between wooded hills and disappeared. More than once I had made a timely escape by splashing through it, leaving my pursuers, who did not care to soak their only pair of shoes, to dance on the far bank. But its winsome limpid shallows could be deadly if another student had you by the back of the neck and was forcing you down, down into the airless rush and glitter . . . I veered back into the bushes. The other boys and girls roared with joyful rage and began thrashing through the thicket toward me.
“Little Bobby Black-bird swimming in the sea,” I caroled, “singing to the pussy-cat, you can’t catch me!”
They caught me, had me, were pulling on my pinafore so hard I fell over backwards. I lay staring up at a ring of mirthful faces and above them swaying leaves against a white indifferent sky.
“Black-bird, black-bird,” they chanted, and kicked leaves at me and dirt, hooting. A rock bit my side. Then something hot was writing on my stomach and with high laughter several other boys had their flies down too and yellow cords were hissing and drilling into my sides and splashing in my turned-away face through which my visitor was still singing, though now quite calmly and gently, “Little Bobby Black-bird, lying in the ground. Singing to the pussy-cat, I’ll never be found.”
And then suddenly they were not there anymore and nothing was but that voice, though it was now more like a landscape than a sound. After a little while I struck up a self. I seemed to be dressed in my usual clothes but there was something strange about my feet, I felt sure that they were on backwards, though they looked no different than usual, and I understood that I was crippled, we all were, having turned our feet around to deceive ourselves about the direction we were going. I lost myself in these and similar reflections for an eternity, and I use the word advisedly, for it would have been eternity indeed had not one of my frightened tormentors run off to confess their misdeeds to a teacher. The next thing I felt was an unpleasant wrenching, somewhere under my ribs, and then I was flat on my back in the Headmistress’s office, staring up into her inverted face. I turned my head and vomited onto the rug.
That was the first time I visited the land of the dead.
Readings
from “A Visitor’s Observations”
On Articles of Dress
That the topic of ornamental sculpture leads naturally to that of fashion, anyone who has seen a poke bonnet or top hat, hoop skirt, or ruff must agree. I saw some curious articles worn by students and faculty alike. I will not call them clothing, as they resembled many other human inventions so much more closely: slings, baffles, windbreaks, kites or koinobori. Some seemed to be a kind of camouflage, some protective, like medieval armor or beekeepers’ suits, some, in which the wearer moved with flinching care, to be instruments of self-punishment or mortification. Many incorporated elements that could ostensibly be used in some professional capacity (that is, in communicating with the dead), such as inflatable bladders sewn into the lining of a gorget in which breath could be stored for emergency release; cheesecloth seines, trawls, and creels for collecting ectoplasm; or telescoping cones made of whalebone frames covered with waxed cloth or paper that could be strapped onto one’s mouth or, with a small adjustment to the armature, one’s ear. (Some of the latter were as much as eight feet in length, and their wearers required seconds whose sole task was to support the wide end of the cone on a pole with a curved and padded saddle on the end.)
Some costumes fluttered with countless tassels and fringes that far from being decorative gave one the disquieting impression that the wearer was gradually disintegrating into the surrounding air, and in fact its finest threads, light enough to be lofted by the least current of air, sometimes brushed against one’s upper lip long after the wearer had apparently left the room. Some bristled with whalebone spars up which vanes, spinnakers, and flags could be run. Some had extensive outlying parts: extra detached sleeves, epaulets upon epaulets, storm flaps, petticoats, snoods, bustles, ruffs, and cummerbunds that all had to be laboriously gathered up and carried along whenever the wearer decided to move. Some were so cumbersome in their volumes of heavy fabric that they effectively prohibited movement; I remember one that resembled an untidy hay-bale onto the side of which the tiny wearer was awkwardly strapped, as if she were no more than an accessory to her outfit. Some were designed to fasten around a piece of furniture, an architectural element such as a stair baluster, or another person (who did not always appear entirely complacent in the role). Others, resembling sails, really became sails whenever the wind blew, sweeping up the incautious wearer and hustling him along, until a wall or hedge stopped his progress. A few were so tiny—a scrap of cloth intricately bound around an earlobe, say, or the tip of a finger—that the wearer was effectively undressed (though fully if not decently clad in the thick, scratchy, institutional smallclothes issued to all students and faculty to mollify the frigid conditions obtaining at the school). Some outfits seemed to be entirely invisible; I do not know whether they were worn internally (belted around the tongue or a tooth, for instance), were carried in a hand, or did not even take physical form, being composed of the smell of damp wool, the mere idea of a dress kept firmly in mind, or a story repeated at intervals about, say, an exquisite but deadly shawl, whose pattern, picked out in embroidery silks that had steeped in poison, etched itself into the skin of the wearer.
From time to time an outfit would be greeted with indignant cries of “Not so!” and “It’s a lie!” Eventually it was explained to me that they were not merely garments but propositions, provocations, conjectures, rumors, slanders. Some seemed designed solely to refute an outfit worn by another student, whether in formal rejoinder, parody, or the pedantic correction of a host of minor details. And some, indeed many, perhaps (understood correctly) all, refuted the wearer himself, since one of the principle tenets of the Vocational School was that the first person is an illusion, to be programmatically dispelled. I saw one student, for example, gliding about in a wheeled whalebone framework from which hung so many curtains, lambrequins, and shades, constantly opening and closing, that her person could not even be located within them. Of course, this made the ensemble, if not the person wearing it, all the more conspicuous, but then the effect on prospective viewers never seemed to be the point of the costumes of the Vocational School.
Sometimes entire outfits were in the subjunctive case, as if to say, “If I were to dress myself today, it would be in this way, but of course I will not, for no such person exists.” Perhaps one could say as much of the fashions worn in the world at large, and I only noticed it for the first time here, at the Vocational School, because the costumes were, to my eye, so outlandish, and the population so small and isolated that new styles evolved at a fast clip. Or maybe the school has denatured the sphere of fashion for me as it has denatured that of language,
so that I can no longer look at a boned bodice without consternation, as at a smaller, portable iron maiden, or regard a crepe mourning bonnet as anything but a listening device.
Speaking of bonnets, the sheer variety of these, as of helmets, muzzles, and other headgear worn at the school, was such as to dismay the taxonomist. Among the simplest was an oval of black tulle stretched over a wire frame, held up on another wire from a yoke that fit over the neck and shoulders in such a way as to entirely hide the wearer’s face from view, if you were standing directly before her.
I remember another, more complex, whose innumerable tiny wires, radiating from a central armature, were passed through one end of as many tiny strips of paper of varying lengths on which printed words and phrases could be made out, probably sliced from a book, creating a fluttering penumbra at least five feet in diameter and somewhat resembling a dandelion seed head, through which the human head inside it could be made out only as a shadow. It must have taken days to make, and yet I saw it in use only once, and at the end of the day (a day whose still moments crepitated with disquieting whispers) the wearer removed it, held a lit match to it, and tossed it onto the gravel drive, where it softly bounced, tumbled, bloomed with flame, and went out.
Letters to Dead Authors, #10
Dear Mrs. Mina Harker,
Now it is my mother whose voice I seemed to hear. I was strolling down the corridor, listening complacently to the muffled retching of muzzled juniors, when a door flew open, releasing a cacophony in which I heard those familiar accents, and Finster darted out, trailing streamers of batting, a savage look on her face. It has put me in a very thoughtful mood.
In the words of a persistent newspaper columnist who has lately dogged my steps, why do I disturb the blessed rest of the departed, to draw from them their secrets, when there are living people eager to confess theirs on every street corner? Why wait until the Veil is drawn to bend an ear? Why do I cling to the dear departed, yet give no succor to the living, etc., etc.?
I have just spent a very long time staring at the candle flame (its afterimage, a bluish flame, is flicking and sliding now across the page on which I write these words). Someone is growling quietly in my throat. Or snoring, perhaps. I too am tired. Last night one of the children sleepwalked into my bedchamber, urinated in my second-best bonnet, and departed before I could shed my lethargy enough to turn him out.
I think he was sleepwalking.
We have a number of sleepwalkers here.
In any case I could not get back to sleep until nearly dawn.
It is true, Mina, that the living are merely unmatriculated dead, and any one of them may be as wise, as wicked, as tender, or as cruel as any spirit you could name. But I do not speak to the departed because they are dear to me. I am different from the majority of Spirit Mediums and Trance Speakers in this regard: It is not grief that draws me toward that Chasm, whose other shore is crowded with loved ones we have lost. It is not anger, either. It is . . .
I want to know.
Know what?
What it is like to exist, for instance. Contrary to popular opinion, only the dead can tell us that. You do not ask a horse what it is to be a horse. A bad example. I cannot think of a good one. Never mind. I mean simply that one must stand outside a thing in order to describe it; we cannot say what our eyes look like, what our tongues taste like, or what listening sounds like. We cannot know our knowing, or say what it is that saying says. And so we must cease to live in order to study life. That this leaves no one to record the results, some might call a cruel paradox, or a lesson in acceptance.
I call it a technicality.
And so I ask the question (for you yourself are dead, if you do not mind my saying so): What is living like?
What is the world like?
What are we?
And in a word: What?
But the telephone is ringing and—
I have just had an unpleasant conversation with one of our trustees. For the first five minutes I could not figure out which of our students she was talking about, but not imagining that it could be important, I regrettably decided to carry on without clearing up this point. When it became clear from my responses that I was laboring under a delusion, she very nearly put down the phone. The mistake was unfortunate, but understandable—I cannot know every student personally! She took the position, however, that I ought at least to remember this one. As if to die were a feat of particular originality. When I tried to explain that I had more important considerations than the carelessness of one not very talented child in getting himself killed, she became unreasonable. My nature is imperious, my temper hot; I nearly told her to go to the devil, but I bethought me of the handsome cheque we receive from her every autumn and began hastily offering up reassurances that no more students would die, which I am afraid were not sincere or even sensible, for how can I keep the executioner’s axe from the neck that summons it? Not a single person has ever done so.
What a blight on the soul of a Seeker are pecuniary considerations!
When we had both cooled a little, I inquired as to where she had learned of the affair. It was the most important newspaper in which my school had yet figured, and I privately jubilated. While the incident may cast us in an unflattering light, I find that my theories stretch toward the light . . . I want them better-known.
It should be no big surprise. Dying, one thinks of one’s legacy, and I have been dying my whole life.
Reply soonest,
Headmistress Joines
11. The Final Dispatch, contd.
[Crackling:] Where am I?
In the gymnasium with Miss Exiguous, Mr. Mallow, Mother Other, and the girl.
Again?
Again.
In life, things happen only once, as I recall. Therefore I am dead, in the provisional, the necronautical sense. Dead, and cooking up a scene; Miss Exiguous and Mr. Mallow are not really here.
“So there you are.” It is Finster. And yet [static] it is not. “Put out your hands and take your punishment.”
“Father,” I say again. Again I tremble. [Static.]
Then another voice speaks through her. Frankly I doubt it is really my mother, she never stuck up for me. “Pay no attention to him. He was never the man he thought he was, and he is still less that man today.”
“Whereas you are the whore you always were, you whore.”
Miss Exiguous, who, even as a figment, is nothing if not correct, takes Mr. Mallow by the arm and summoning the few students still at practice leads them from the room in tactful silence.
“Mistress Other,” I say, “you may go too.”
The large woman draws herself up. “I don’t know that I should leave you with that girl, Headmistress Joines. She might forget herself. I would not want her to commit an outrage against your person.”
“My person is my own concern, Mistress Other. I hardly think that a small child poses a threat to it. Please leave us.”
Seeing that she still hesitates, I exclaim, “Winnifred! Do I have to invoke my authority?” Mother Other flushes, seems about to say something further, then sets her mouth and leaves me alone with the girl, whose face is alternating quickly between two masks, like Comedy and Tragedy, though these are surely both the face of tragedy, and yet tragedy often has two sides and indeed two names and my tragedy is called both Mother and Father.
“My darling”—my father says to me, with cutting sarcasm—“at last we have a chance to really get to know each other, something I have always wanted, whether you knew it or not. Why, I’m your biggest fan. Headmistress Joines, is that what they call you? Well, isn’t that nice! My daughter, who has always been so good at telling others what to do. I would be the first to admit that you have a persuasive way about you. Why, I believe you could get a man to do almost anything, whether it was in his best interests or not. I believe you might even be able to persuade him that it was his own idea, when really his little girl had put it in his mind, d
rop by drop, day by day, like a slow poison, in that quiet, cool little voice that as if to mock my ambitions for you had shed its stammer for this sole occasion, saying don’t you think and sometimes I wonder and isn’t it true, Papa, that, the words sinking deeper and deeper into a man’s heart until he almost believed the lies you told him, a little girl who should never even have thought such thoughts, let alone thought them of her father—”
“Finster,” I said, “end this session at once.” She blinked and shut her mouth. “You will repair to the dormitory immediately and sit quietly on your bed with your hands in your lap until the lunch bell is rung.” I handed her a cork. She inserted it, and left, and I sank down upon a stool, adjusting my skirt with shaking hands.
I could have put her in the oubliette, I suppose.
Cross that out. Sometimes I forget that one does not say such things.
But one is free to hope, I believe. Something [static] could happen to her, things do, there are stairs down which children sometimes run much too quickly, there are bottles of fluids about which children are naturally curious but from which [static] I am sure they should not drink, and there is the land of the dead, from which we do not all return, where a shed [static] has been assembling itself around me for the last few clauses. Under my feet are black boards, scuffed soft. Splintery, gray, split, and rivered boards rise up and tack themselves to nothing; angled beams through which tar paper shows lower themselves from the plaster medallion in the ceiling. The tiny window with its cracked pane shows my oak paneling for a moment, then a familiar foam of foliage.
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