A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  The play stirred most of the audience to protest, especially the professors who shouted “ENOUGH” and “TOO MUCH.”

  Soon nailed to trees on the quad were copies of an unsigned rhyme called “The Ballad of Lotus Land.”

  Van can’t well

  Or moderately well.

  In the Vanderluyden Bordello

  They say the poor fellow

  Can’t even manage at all.

  Can it be that poor Van

  Is in need of a man?

  They conferred in the hall:

  “I’ve seen this quite oft,

  We’ll get him aloft.”

  “Just wait till it rises

  They come in all sizes,

  Though not many come when they’re soft.”

  “Begging your pardon

  They’re bringing the Bard in.

  He’s saying, ‘This time he won’t fail.’

  He’s in the Garden

  Trying to harden

  And make of Van’s Moby a whale.”

  “It seems that I’ve started rumours by trying not to,” Van said. “It seems that one is presumed to be that way unless one consorts with prostitutes.”

  “Never mind,” Landish said. “I’ll write and plaster all over Princeton a rhyme called ‘The Enormous Endowments of the Vanderluydens.’ ”

  “It would only make things worse,” Van said, “no matter how clever it was. I should never have come to Princeton. I should have kept on with my tutors in New York, where I was dogged by so many rumours I hardly took notice when a new one came along.” Van paused. “Do you think it odd to grieve for one’s sister, Landish, even if one’s grief goes on for years?”

  “No,” Landish said. “But Vanderland will not bring your sister back.”

  “It is not in the lunatic hope of resurrecting the dead—”

  “I’m sorry,” Landish said, “but it seems to me that you are suffering more from guilt than grief, guilt due to the unwarranted accusations of your family.”

  “You don’t understand. And it will be years before Vanderland is completed in Carolina. I shall have to live in New York until then. At least in the winter. I despise New York.”

  Van put his hands on Landish’s shoulders.

  “Don’t go home, Landish. Come to New York and then to Vanderland with me. I won’t be able to measure up without you. I will fail just as all the people in my life expect me to.”

  There had been tears in his eyes. It was Landish’s turn to feel guilty. His wit had merely emboldened their enemies to attack the one of them who was defenceless. But, unsure of how to answer, he told Van that he would think about his invitation.

  He began to think about graduating from Princeton, the end of the reign of the Umbrage Players, the end of Druken and his Circle, his leadership of both, the dismantlement, abandonment of Lotus Land. He wondered if he might somehow be able to linger on in the town of Princeton, perhaps convince other members of the Players and the Circle to do so and cull the most interesting of the new students for their Thursday salons. But without Lotus Land, without Van’s seemingly self-replenishing board of food and drink and cognac and cigars and the settees and sofas on which they lounged about—without all of this, none of it would work.

  Yet, though Van many times repeated his entreaty that Landish come to Vanderland, Landish said no.

  “I’ve been dreading the end of Lotus Land as much as you have,” Van said. “The two of us going our separate ways, you to as remote and wild a place as Newfoundland. At my invitation, famous writers and other artists will be staying at Vanderland for months, perhaps years. You could be the presiding wit of Vanderland. We could still have our salons.”

  “Me? Me, the presiding wit of a room full of world-famous writers. What do you plan to do, make it a condition of their stay at Vanderland that they pretend to take me seriously? I can just imagine what a figure of fun I would come to be among the artists of Vanderland. The ascots’ mascot. The writer who burns his every word. I would have no credentials, Van. All of this—Lotus Land, the Umbrage Players, Druken and his Circle—it can’t just be relocated to Vanderland. Not even the Vanderluyden fortune can prolong this time in our lives.”

  “You don’t understand what sort of place Vanderland will be. I’ll invite whomever I want to stay there, whomever you want. I’ll consult with you. If you don’t feel at ease among one group, we can simply find another.”

  “Another group. Made up of lesser minds whose presiding wit I could be.”

  “You’ve made such a promising beginning, Landish. Please don’t squander it. Don’t tell me that, after making your escape from it, you are going to return to some back-of-beyond place where no one has ever done or ever will do anything worth remembering, anything that will endure. I’m offering you what every writer dreams of, freedom from the nuisance of some body-and-soul-draining, penny-earning occupation. Even Shakespeare needed a patron whose praises he sang in sycophantic sonnets.”

  “I’m not Shakespeare. Though they called me the Bard in that broadsheet.”

  “Forget that. Forget them. Vanderland will not be some hermit’s hut. Those of us who live there will want for nothing. But it will be so self-sufficient there will simply be no need to go elsewhere. It will be a sanctuary, but a vast one. Think of it as being enclosed by a mesh that will admit only what little there is of true value in the world and filter out the rest.”

  “I would never be at home in some Carolina mansion.”

  Van had begun to suffer a decline. He had always struggled to get even passing grades, but was soon unable to put pen to paper.

  “Vanderluyden or not, I have to at least seem to be a student, if only to guarantee that I get my inheritance.”

  So Landish wrote Van’s essays, mimicking his style. That is, he underwrote them, for he knew it wouldn’t do for a C student to suddenly start getting A grades. Landish wrote them. Van copied them out in his handwriting and submitted them.

  Van returned to Lotus Land frantic one afternoon, saying that he had made a dreadful mistake, submitting the wrong essay, one that bore his name but was, as his professor noticed, in the handwriting of Landish.

  So they were caught, Van and Landish.

  But Van would be allowed to graduate and his cheating would be kept a secret—whereas Landish, for whose comeuppance his professors had long hoped and prayed, would be expelled.

  “Come to Vanderland with me, Landish,” Van said. “You need never go home. You can be my lifelong guest. A couple of years in New York and then you can help me finish overseeing the building of Vanderland. You can write your books and we’ll raise our families there. No one will know what took place at Princeton. Anyone who does know won’t dare say a word. This house, this world that I’m constructing, could be yours as much as mine. As soon as you set eyes on it, you’ll understand.”

  But Landish told him that he couldn’t conceive of living anywhere but among the only people he knew well enough to write about.

  Landish walked the length of Dark Marsh Road. He didn’t turn back where the path met the woods. He ran until the path so narrowed that branches lashed his face and brought to his eyes tears that wouldn’t stop. He looked up at the sky in which there was so bright a moon he couldn’t see the stars.

  Landish had only to gather his things from Vanderland and catch the Vanderluyden-owned train to New York, from which he would sail on a Vanderluyden ship to Newfoundland.

  He lingered for a few days, throughout which Van apologized and refused to go to class. Van said it was unfair that Landish be expelled. “But I must warn you not to publicize the truth, or you and yours will be sued penniless, or worse, by my brothers.”

  “It had never crossed my mind to ask you to do anything but stay silent on the matter,” Landish said.

  “Isn’t it better that one of us survives than that both of us be destroyed?” Van said.

  “I don’t think of myself as having been destroyed.”

  “I didn�
��t mean destroyed,” Van said. “Of course you haven’t been destroyed. It’s just that you have nothing to return to. Unless you agree to captain the Gilbert for the rest of your life. Which I know how loath you are to do.”

  “What would you do in my circumstances?” Landish said.

  “I would go with my friend to Vanderland. Please reconsider.”

  “I can’t simply enlist in someone else’s dreams and discard my own. Nor can I put into words how much I will miss you.”

  “I refuse to say goodbye to you. I will write to you every day asking you, begging you to change your mind. It will never be too late for you to change it. We will one day be reunited at Vanderland. I am certain of it.”

  “You make Vanderland sound like some sort of afterlife.”

  “As you know,” Van said, “I as yet have no real money of my own. But I will see to it soon that you are fully compensated should you incur any losses because of your expulsion from Princeton from now until you accept my invitation, which I predict you will do once you are back in Newfoundland and see what not accepting it would mean.”

  Landish told him he needed no compensation for helping a friend, but Van insisted.

  “I’ll never forget, Landish,” he said. “Never, as long as I live, will I forget the sacrifice that you made for me.”

  “I’ll never forget you, either,” Landish told him. “Nor the day we met, the day that you approached me on the quad.”

  On the day before Landish left Princeton, he met on the street a student who had applied for admission to Lotus Land and been rejected.

  “You have Vanderluyden to thank for what’s been done to you,” the fellow said. “He approached some professors about devising a scheme to get you expelled. I don’t know why.”

  At first Landish took it to be nothing but a spiteful lie. But he walked about the streets of the town, trying to convince himself that the fellow was foolhardy enough to tell such a lie about a Vanderluyden.

  He ran back to Lotus Land. Van was in the front room, standing, arms folded, in front of the fire.

  “Why did you do this?” Landish said, advancing on Van, who backed away and began to cry.

  “How else could I keep you in my life?”

  “You ruined me so that I would have no choice but to go with you?”

  “I had to try something or else I would never have set eyes on you again.”

  “Nor will you,” Landish said. “Nor hear from me again.”

  “You’re no better. You’ve known for years that you’d betray your father.”

  “Yes. For which I deserve to be disowned. As I will be.”

  Mr. Trull walked into the room as casually as if he always had the freedom of the whole house. Dressed for the outdoors in an overcoat and hat, he slowly withdrew a pistol from the pocket of his coat and pointed it at Landish.

  “We’ll be leaving now, you and me,” Mr. Trull said. “I’ll take you to the station and you won’t say a word or give me any trouble while we’re waiting for the train.”

  Van began to make his way from the room. He stopped in the doorway and rubbed his nose with his sleeve. “It would have worked, Landish,” he said. “If only you’d said yes.”

  Landish might never have known he’d been betrayed if he’d said yes after “they” were caught. Would their friendship have been a sham even if Landish didn’t know what Van had done and Van believed that he had done no wrong?

  He thought so.

  But he would not be living in an attic now, counting what remained of his “compensation,” with no clue what he would do when it ran out.

  The Attic

  LANDISH WOKE AND SAT on the edge of the bed in the darkness, trying to decide, his feet on the floor, his hands on the mattress. He could make his way to Cluding Deacon through the snow, demand to be let in no matter the time, go from room to room, bed to bed if need be, looking for her baby boy, reading her letters aloud if he had to, though he doubted it would come to that, it being unlikely that they would say no to the first person of any name who had gone there with what he had in mind.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for hours, then lay down again. He tried to reason it out. With whom would the boy be better off, him or them? He couldn’t name a child who had prospered because of or in spite of the place called Cluding Deacon. But what chance of prospering would a charge of his have? They knew better than he did how to care for a child’s most basic needs. With them, the boy would at least have comradeship, even if it was no more than company in misery.

  He would be alone with Landish, and Landish himself had every reason to expect to be alone. But there was Cluding Deacon’s reputation. Better the boy suffer who knew what number of lesser torments than the ones that were rampant at that place.

  He mulled it over night after night in this manner and found that he could make as good an argument for taking the boy from the orphanage as for ignoring the letters the boy’s mother had written to him demanding that Landish take responsibility for him. And then there was the matter of what Landish wanted. He thought first of his book. He didn’t even know yet what it would be about, but the “feeling” of fall, which he could summon up in any season, convinced him that the book would follow on the writing of an acceptable first page, the subject of which would only announce itself as he was in the act of putting pen to paper. The boy would surely be an impediment to the book’s completion, given that without the boy he had yet to write even a sentence that he could stand. So he obsessively argued both sides of the question but came no closer to an answer.

  She said that she was halfway gone herself, as good as lost, so she was writing to him while she was still able to. She said Landish would bring upon himself God’s eternal shame if he didn’t take Deacon from the orphanage and raise him as his own. She said her husband had made a lot of money for Landish’s father that should be spent on her baby, not just on Landish, whose father was to blame for her husband’s death two years before. Landish wrote back to her that it was only to satisfy his father’s wishes that he was still the skipper of his own clothes.

  She replied that she would soon be “in the place from which no one knows the way back home.” He was astonished by the eloquence of her letters.

  I am only sorry that I let him live, have let him think for so long that he would go unpunished for his crimes. I should have gone to his house with my husband’s gun the day the Gilbert came back without him.

  I am guilty, but only of every breath I could have prevented him from drawing, every moment I let him live after I heard on the street that, far from bringing my husband safely home, he had not even brought his body back to me. He never spoke a word of consolation or regret to me.

  For some time now, I have been silent in a silent world, often spoken to but never speaking. I “hear” but nothing touches me. Things that once made sound have for some time made none, though I have never stopped expecting this to change, never stopped anticipating sounds that never came, sounds of collisions, voices, vehicles, the striking of hammers and the blowing of whistles, the sounds of footsteps and the galloping of horses, the shrill pitch of the wind.

  It has for long seemed that the world was buried deep in snow or lay submerged beneath the fathoms of a sea that muffled every sound. Perhaps because I have been for so long not quite fully alive I have no fear of death, no feelings at all about it in fact. I will do nothing to hurry near the day of my death but will merely await it with my customary patience.

  An inscrutable universe had, by foisting the riddle upon him, offered him the chance to change two lives. The boy knew nothing about it and likely never would if Landish declined him. So Landish decided it was no one’s choice but his.

  Birth is a bundle of joy.

  Death is a dwindle of joy.

  He heard the answer. No impetus, no volition inclined his will towards the boy except the word which, though it woke him, was beyond recall.

  He went there early in the morning and brought the boy back to t
he attic. The boy went to sleep in a place he would never see again and woke up in one he had never seen before.

  “Welcome to the attic,” Landish said to the face that peered out at him from a bundle of blankets. “It is ever a hovel and no place like home.”

  There were two rooms, a kitchen to which the stairs led and a bedroom you could only reach by way of the kitchen; no windows except for a kind of wooden-shuttered porthole in the bedroom. It always seemed like nighttime in the attic, especially in the kitchen, where the lamps were lit at noon the same as they were long after sunset. There was a black iron stove with a single damper so Landish could heat only one pot at a time; a wooden table that wobbled no matter what you put beneath its legs; two wooden chairs whose legs were enwrapped with reams of twine; a sink with a long faucet that at one end looped like a cane. Ice-cold water dripped unceasingly from it and barely reached a trickle when you turned the tap.

  The attic in the summer was so hot you couldn’t breathe, and the wind in the winter blew right through the walls. The candles flickered when it gusted and guttered when it roared and you could catch your death unless you slept with your head beneath the blankets.

  The boy’s name was Deacon. They had told him so at the orphanage and said they couldn’t account for the coincidence, the boy having the same name as their institution. Deacon’s father was known in St. John’s as “Carson of the Gilbert,” legendary for his heroism and the manner of his death.