Enigmatic Pilot (37 page)

As outrageous as the things the gambler had told him were, Lloyd acknowledged that there was a kind of consistency to them—and consistency, whatever form it takes, is always the hallmark of something one should pay attention to.

To Lloyd, the “painting phenomenon” was a transformation analogous to what he imagined occurring with the twins’ secret writing—and what the horse-faced girl may have been alluding to. The amount of space, the frame for each, did not change, but what happened within the frame did, over time. Time was the crucial element. Time and the observer, of course. Without someone to observe the changes, would they occur?

His mind had often spun around this perennial question of philosophy and perception. But now he saw that there was another aspect. There was the much more subtle yet still intensely practical issue of
how
the presence of a perceiver changed the event or object viewed. If, for instance, one was willing to grant some occult instability to the twins’ writing,
what was it that triggered the changing? People, when they know they are being watched, behave differently from when they think they are alone and unseen. They perform. Could it be that in some way the markings were
performing
, and that the increase in their luminosity was influenced by the number of people and the intensity of attention paid? This would suggest that there was something important about his own particular participation, for the markings had shone brighter when he made physical contact.

This chain of thought brought to mind a comment his mother had made years before, when the husband of one of her herbal-remedy patients had asked with mock seriousness if she honestly believed ghosts were “truly real” or if she was just being colorful and folksy and thought that they were “creatures in the mind.” To Lloyd’s surprise, Rapture dropped the usual white accent she used in public and replied, “Show me now where yer mine true ends and de worl’ begins, I show you plenny ghosts.”

Something about ghosts. And time
.

Ghosts and time were intimately related, and yet profoundly disconnected. For what were ghosts but people who had stepped out of time—who were now immune to time—watching from outside, interacting with the world but no longer of it?

What would the world look like outside time? Lloyd wondered in his sleep. What would human culture look like—or sound like—outside language?

Time was change. The glyphs of the Ambassadors seemed to be constantly changing, except for the spiral symbol that looked like a tornado. So their language had something to do with time.

But was not a written language always about time? A fixing and freezing of a spoken language? In his dream state it occurred to him that he had assumed that the markings and carvings were transcriptions of the alien tongue the twins seemed
to share. Their behavior had suggested that they understood each other’s sounds. Because the one was so bizarre, he had made the link to their markings; it was not surprising that a method of transcription would appear alien, too. What had puzzled him was why they needed to write. If no one else could understand their language, what was the point of writing? They could speak to each other.

Looking at these assumptions now, he saw that people often write things down for their private benefit. (He did.) To make things clearer for themselves. To prioritize. To remember. Or for other as yet unknown people to find and read. To teach. What were most books? Messages written in the hope of being found and decoded. Perhaps the brothers were trying to teach people their language, only it was hard to find a suitable student.

Something about ghosts. And time
.

In his trance state, Lloyd slipped through the hierograms and the phenomenon of their luminosity for a moment, back to the Martian Ambassadors’ speech and the question of what things would not just look like but sound like outside or in some new relation to time. Yes, there was something about ghosts and time when it came to the twins. And tornadoes—or at least the tornado that they had dropped out of.

He spiraled around and around, trying to cut through the shame and guilt he felt about his actions toward them, to hear their voices again, to visualize the changes he had imagined in their hierograms. Why was it that the one symbol that seemed the most representative of dynamism—the spiral icon—was the one element that he was certain remained constant?

It was not a letter like
A
or
Z
. It was not even a unit of meaning, he thought. It was …

It was a kind of system unto itself. A value system for interpreting all the other symbols and their relationship to each other. Was that it?

He could not grasp onto the mechanism. All his young life
he had sought out with instinctive acuity the essential elements of machine operations and physical processes. He was a born engineer, with a pathological curiosity. Now he was seeing a whole new world open before his dreaming eyes—the possibility that behind and inherent in language were mechanisms equally as real as the physics of a slingshot or the chemistry of a beer vat, but far more mysterious and perhaps much more powerful.

If one could connect the mechanisms of language with ballistics and pharmacology, optics, harmonics, hydraulics and medicine, mathematics and music. If one could master the secrets of symbols and syphons, surgeries and solar energy. If one knew the exact point where the mind ended and the world began, and could render it …

Who would need projectiles if they had mastered that enigmatic science?

He glimpsed then, for just a flutter, a symbol so potent that it was beyond all representation of other things and ideas, but alive unto itself. Inclusive and yet apart. Because it was the Whole—simultaneously inside and outside itself. Not the word made flesh but
the word made time—and the ghosts made flesh
.

That was what the spiral of the twins was, perhaps. That was what he had caught a flicker of that night with his beloved Hattie.

A key and a keyhole, too. And if one could pass through the spiral one could look back and see and hear the secret language unified and clear. He fixed his mind on this and sent himself outward, imaginatively trying to enter the spiral, to gain the other side. And then …

Swirling strings and flowering fractals of ideograms and morphemes exploded before his eyes, as if the dusty leather-bound tomes he had pored over in Schelling’s bookshop had opened all at once inside his head. He saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, lush brush-stroked Chinese characters on long, unwinding scrolls. Arabic poems tiled into mosaics. Greek and
Hebrew letters hammered in stone. Alchemical and astrological symbols. The tracks of animals in tar pits—the silhouettes of bison and ibex on cave walls—musical notes, tattoos, hand signals, constellations. Complicated chains of numbers twined into lattices that in turn formed the skeletons of fabulous beasts like gryphons and unicorns, whose emerging flesh and scales then took on the mesmerizing puzzle patterns of still more figures—radiant angels and ghastly demons, horned-bone shaman masks and polished metal armor made of tinier masks made of geometric shapes that were the visual representation of still other numbers, coalescing to build vast temples and coliseums of notation that grew and glistened like sentient crystal systems. On and on the symbols rained at him, blossoming into jungles of unknown significance—metamorphosing into monsters and monoliths, titans, totems, face cards, and pieces in forgotten games.

But through all the pictograms and treble clefs repeatedly appearing amid the empires of equations and alphabets was the insignia of the Vardogers’ clawed candle, and the tornado emblem of the teratoid twins—a spiral choreography suggestive of conceptual aggregates and psychological associations—which was something entirely different. As different as the momentary flare of a firefly in a bean row from the electric haunted hieroglyph you would see if you could follow its whole life—every single pulse and drift of wing—and hold it in your mind as easily as that one blink. It was as different as the bending of the youngest blade of grass in a fifty-acre field from … the wind.

The wind made him think of his ghost sister, Lodema, and he recalled where he had got the notion of building shrines to her that summoned and revealed the subtlety and power of the unseen breeze. It was because of the old Wyandot man back in Zanesville, King Billy.

King Billy made moonshine and talked to himself, but he knew the tracks of every animal, from a field mouse to a fox. He
knew when to fish with hellgrammites and when to use night crawlers. He could tell you the time of night by smell. He read the world with his whole body, his being so embedded within it that he was always on the page that was being written. All around his shack he had rigged up nets of tinkling beads and spoons. King Billy called them “ghost traps.”

Lloyd saw them again in his dream, feathered, jagged—warning, intriguing—sometimes invisible, depending on the light. They kept away bad spirits and busybodies. They defined Billy’s property, reflected his view of the world, and provided decoration. Insects and animals interacted with them, like the shadows and the seasons. Lloyd saw them again now as like the symbols of the Ambassadors. A living web of meanings that marked where the World becomes Mind. Where the Word becomes Time. Where the Ghosts become Flesh.

L
LOYD WAS PRODDED AWAKE BY HIS FATHER, HIS HEAD FILLED TO
bursting with ideas and afterimages from his dreams. The awkwardness of extricating themselves from the coffins, the dreary atmosphere of the Clutters’ business, and the necessity of packing away what belongings they still retained in a safe place so as not to disrupt the activities of the older couple made all three of the Zanesvilleans concur that they would be wise to get organized and on their way to Texas as fast as possible. For Lloyd, of course, the incentive was all the sharper, given that there could be some backlash from the friends and families of the vigilantes.

There were also the claws of the Vardogers to consider. The presence of the insidious music box under the very same roof was a potent reminder of their ingenuity and long reach. It was hard to believe that it was just chance. Not knowing only increased the threat. He thought it essential to keep his prized possessions with him at all times until they found some reliable haven, and so, with great care, he nestled Hattie’s skull and the fearsome Eye into the box of the Martian Ambassadors and tucked it inside his coat, along with the mystery letter from Micah.

As much as the fugitives from Ohio craved company, normalcy,
and being settled, it was obvious that they were not going to find such things in Independence. Their hosts provided still greater, albeit inadvertent, encouragement to get on the trail, as both seemed even more dithery than they had been the day before, to the point where boiling a kettle for coffee was quite beyond Egalantine and the completion of a sentence even with the other’s assistance was out of the question for them both. Rapture took over in what passed for the Clutters’ kitchen, which was still a tad too redolent of the previous night’s supper to promote much of an appetite in anyone but Hephaestus (who had started to regain some healthy color and to put a bit of meat back on his pickled bones). After several false starts, she managed to make them all flapjacks and strong black coffee, as Hephaestus commenced working out a list of the supplies they would need, and Lloyd kept a surreptitious eye on the undertaker-coffinmaker and his wife.

He had a suspicion that there was some dispute that the couple was trying to stifle. Then he noticed Othimiel return one of the music boxes to its place on one of the shelves. It was the Vardogers’ box. Perhaps the Clutters had had another listen unbeknownst to his parents. It occurred to Lloyd that their disorientation and woolgathering might have something to do with further exposure to the beguiling music, and he recalled a remark from the night before that had struck him as queer at the time but which he had dismissed as just another example of their eccentricity. Egalantine had commented on the “choir” she had heard in the music. Lloyd was certain he had heard no voices, and at this point unclear how the impression of human voices could be mechanically achieved (at least with requisite precision).

Everyone had been so taken and distracted by the music, there had been no actual discussion of what they had heard—and the assumption had been that they had all heard the same piece. Now, in his sleepy, wondering post-Quist way, Lloyd asked himself the question What if they had each heard different
music? How would that be possible, and what would it mean?

It was too big a puzzle to resolve without further study (and, ostensibly, more risky investigation of the music box, which he was reluctant to do), but in any case one would have thought that both of the Clutters were suffering the aftereffects of a laudanum binge or some kind of neurological trauma. And the matter worsened over breakfast, with Egalantine dribbling from her chin and making what passed for lewd gestures at her husband, while Othimiel rose from the table and returned a moment later wearing what was, fortunately, an empty chamber pot on his head.

Hephaestus, having done plenty of questionable things himself when soused, tried to be as tolerant and respectful as possible. (His hope was that the Clutters were showing themselves to be habitual tipplers and had been hitting the jug hard and early.) It helped explain their disjointed way of communicating, and the sorry, haphazard state of their business. However, he was stumped as to why they did not smell of alcohol.

Rapture, once she had convinced herself that they were not playing a perverse joke, became concerned for them, and earnestly wished that, whatever the affliction, it was not contagious. “Like the rapid onset of senility,” Lloyd remarked to himself, as his mother helped put the couple back to bed after cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Maybe a bit more rest would bring them back to themselves, as fuzzy and intermittent as that had been.

“I think we need to look alive this morning,” Hephaestus proclaimed as the Sitturds made their way past the coffins and out into the street. “Another couple of nights with those folks—and in this place—I may not get out of the box!”