On the Wing (32 page)

“What a great deal!” I said. “I'd like to see how those thoughts are presented, wouldn't you, Al?”

“Well—”

“All right, look,” said Amanda, “this is absolutely the last preview I'm going to give you. The Gallery of Broken Dreams. It is profoundly depressing. That's what the brochure says: ‘profoundly depressing.' I'd have to agree with that. What it is, see, is a very, very realistic depiction of—what should I call it? I couldn't describe it for you. And even if I could, it wouldn't have the same effect on you. You have to see it. You have to experience it. I saw it once, and it was—let me tell you—profoundly depressing. An unforgettable experience. Many people return again and again. You want to take me up on the twofer offer?”

“Peter,” said Albertine, “maybe we should just find someplace where we could get some lunch.”

“Got an excellent restaurant right in town,” said Amanda wearily. “Serves Olivia's favorite meals, including every meal that used to be a favorite but has fallen out of favor as well as the ones that are up-and-coming.”

“Could we just go to the restaurant and not visit the museum?” Albertine asked.

“Technically speaking, no,” said Amanda.

“The restaurant is part of the museum, Al,” I said to Albertine.

“Oh, how silly of me not to realize that,” said Al.

To Amanda, I said, “It could be called the Gallery of Favorite Meals, couldn't it, Amanda?”

“It is,” she said.

“In my museum, if Babbington decides to establish one, we would have clam chowder—”

“Folks, I'm going to have to ask you to purchase passes or clear the entry portal,” said Amanda. “Traffic's going to start backing up here.”

I twisted around. I didn't see another car. “Nobody's coming,” I said. “I'll make this short. Clam chowder would be particularly important in my museum because I've always thought of clam chowder as a metaphor for life—life in general and my life in particular—”

“There's a dust cloud on the horizon,” said Amanda. “Might be a tour bus coming. Either you're going to have to buy a couple of passes and enter Olivia or you're going to have to turn this funny little vehicle of yours around and skedaddle. I can't have you blocking the entry.”

“The kind of chowder I'm talking about,” I said, “the kind that would be served in the Museum of Peter, is the kind made with tomatoes—”

I was thrown forward, against the restraint of my seat belt, by the sudden rearward motion of the Electro-Flyer. Albertine swung the car in a violent reverse U-turn and accelerated away from the admissions booth.

“Hey!” I protested.

“Don't even think of it,” she said, still accelerating.

“What?” I asked.

“What you're thinking about.”

“But—”

“Just file it away under Muddleheaded Dreams.”

“But—”

“Unless you want to walk the rest of the way to Corosso.”

“But—”

“And back.”

So I filed the Museum of Peter there, among my other muddleheaded dreams, in that bulging folder.

Chapter 27

Advice from Afar

I ENTERED THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT the next morning.
Spirit
and I crested a little hill, and we began accelerating as we headed downward. The rush of air beneath her wings gave us both a lift. Neither of us said anything, but both of us felt it. We were not quite touching the road. Downward we raced, faster and faster, growing lighter and less earth-bound as we went. When we passed the sign that welcomed us to New Mexico we must have hit a bump. Something gave us a sudden upward leap, something more effective than wishful thinking. We were aloft. For a few thrilling feet, we soared through the air. I was not accustomed to flying.
Spirit
handled differently in the air, and I didn't have a practiced hand at the controls.

“Don't overreact,” she warned me.

“I know, I know,” I said.

My hand trembled, and her wings waggled, but we kept our course. In a moment she touched the ground again, but she bounced, and we regained the air. We descended the slope in a series of graceful flutters, and when we had spent our momentum and were grounded again, we were very pleased with our flight, and very, very pleased with ourselves.

“Whew,” I said in a long exhalation of the breath that I'd been holding.

“That was amazing,” said
Spirit.

I pulled slowly to the side of the road, and we sat there, idling, recovering from the thrill of it all. We had stopped beside a tent, and we were surrounded by rose petals.

“What's all this on the ground?” I asked
Spirit.

“Rose petals,” she said.

“I don't see any rosebushes.”

“I think the petals have been strewn here to make a path. See the way they lead into the tent?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see what you mean. I wonder if that's the sort of thing Matthew and the other students at the Summer Institute in Corosso are planning for our arrival. It would be—”

A man poked his head from the entrance to the tent. When he saw me, his eyes popped.

“My god,” he said with a great gasp. “You've come.”

“Um, yes,” I said. “I've come from—”

“Don't tell me,” he said. “Tell everyone inside. They've been waiting for you, waiting for a very long time, and they are going to be thrilled to hear what you have to say from your very own lips.” He paused a moment and then said, more to himself than to me, “You actually do have lips. Interesting.”

“People are waiting for me?” I said. “They knew that I was coming?”

“They
hoped
that you were coming,” he said. “Wait here. That is, wait here, if you don't mind waiting here. I don't mean to—I don't presume to—to give you orders.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “I'll wait.”

“It's just that I want to prepare people for—your appearance. You see, we had no idea what you would look like, and I think that many people have pictured you as—well—different.”

“Maybe if you have a place where I can wash up, comb my hair—”

“No, no, that's all right. Just give me a couple of minutes and—say—do you think you could come flying in on your—ah—conveyance?”

“Sure I could—” I said at once, but I heard an uncertainty in
Spirit
's idle. Was she worried about embarrassing herself, not being able to get off the ground? “Maybe—maybe it would be dangerous—for the people inside,” I said, “if I flew in.”

“Oh.”

“I could taxi in,” I offered. “You know, staying on the ground, slow and steady. That would be safe.”

“Fine. Fine. That would be fine. When you hear me say, ‘The visitor from afar that we have so long awaited has finally arrived,' you come rolling in, down the aisle strewn with rose petals.”

“Visitor from afar?”

He knit his brows and frowned. “You are a visitor from afar, aren't you?” he asked in an urgent whisper.

“I—um—yes—of course,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Don't miss your cue.”

He disappeared through the flaps. I maneuvered
Spirit
so that she and I would be ready to follow him when we heard our cue. I strained to hear what he was saying to the people inside the tent, but I couldn't hear him well over
Spirit
's idling engine. I didn't want to shut her down, because I wanted her to be ready to make her entrance. I hoped that I would catch the words
visitor from afar
when he said them. When they came, they weren't quite what he had told me they would be, but the cue was impossible to mistake.

“I told you!” he suddenly screamed. “I told you that a visitor would come from afar—and here he is!”

I overreacted. In my eagerness to come through the tent flaps on cue, I gunned
Spirit
's throttle, and she leaped forward, scattering rose petals and sending us hurtling down an aisle that led to a raised platform at the far end of the tent. Struggling to control her, I remembered not to compound one overreaction with another and applied her brakes gently. This taught me that underreacting can be as great a fault as overreacting. We were still traveling fast enough for me to call our forward progress hurtling.

To my surprise, eager hands reached out to me from either side, as the people in the crowd rushed to the aisle to get closer to
Spirit
and me and, if possible, to touch us. All those groping, grasping hands on
Spirit
's wings, and a little more forceful application of her brakes, brought us smoothly to a stop in front of the platform, as if I had planned it that way all along.

“Let's give him the welcome we've waited so long to give!”

The audience rose and began to applaud. The man on the dais began beckoning to me, almost frantically, as if we were running out of time.

“Come on up here and tell us what we want to hear!” he cried.

Willing hands steadied
Spirit.
I mounted the few broad steps that brought me to the same level as the man. He spun me around to face the crowd and screamed at them again. “I told you! I told you that a visitor would come from afar!”

He turned to me, and he began to talk to me as if he were confiding in me, though he spoke in a voice that would easily reach the farthest corner of the tent.

“Years ago,” he said, “people began reporting sightings of odd phenomena in the sky, sightings of unidentified flying objects that became known either by their initials, as UFOs, or by their most common shape, as ‘flying saucers.'”

This was something I knew something about.

“That's right!” I said, adopting the same technique of speaking to him and to the crowd at the same time.

A sudden wave of nostalgia struck me, and I had to swallow hard and blink a few times to hide its symptoms.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said hoarsely. “It's just that—when you mentioned unidentified flying objects—it reminded me of home.”

A sympathetic
ohhhh
arose from the crowd.

The man gripped my arm and said, “Of course. You're a long way from home. You must miss home and all the people—or—all the comforts of home. We understand.”

He was right. I was a long way from home, and I did miss its comforts. The mention of UFOs had sent my thoughts back there because back at home, so many miles behind me, in the bookcase in my attic bedroom, I had a small collection of books and magazines devoted to sightings of flying saucers and to speculation about their origins, their crews, and their methods of propulsion. I had built several models of flying saucers from balsa wood and tissue paper, and I had made detectors that were supposed to signal me when a saucer was in the vicinity. I had seen, or thought I had seen, five flying saucers above my neighborhood in Babbington Heights one summer night, the same summer night when I had also seen, or thought I had seen, a naked woman standing in her bedroom window in a house diagonally across the street.

With a bittersweet smile, I remembered the first model I had built. Some of the photographs of unidentified flying objects showed ships that looked like two saucers, the bottom one in the usual orientation when under a coffee cup, the top one inverted and placed so that the rims matched. A young literalist, I tried to make a model of a flying saucer in just that way. It got me into trouble.

“Among the general population,” the man continued, “there was widespread curiosity about the sightings. Many people became anxious about these mysterious UFOs; they wondered about the intentions of their makers and feared that they meant us harm.”

He paused and looked at me significantly. He seemed to want my reaction. I shrugged and said, “I don't know why.” I meant it. I hadn't thought that the creatures aboard the UFOs meant us any harm, but then at the time I had belonged to the segment of the general population that consisted of kids who hoped they would get to ride shotgun in a flying saucer.

I was applauded heartily. I waved to the crowd.

“Another portion of the population was thrilled by UFOs,” he said, “because those people wanted flying objects to be ships from another world, piloted by beings superior to us and concerned for our well-being, itinerant intergalactic mentors who would show us a better way.”

He paused in that significant way again. I extended my hand, greeting him as one member of the segment of the population that wanted the beings to show us a better way to another, and he shook it.

Thunderous applause.

“Another segment of the population thought it was all a lot of hooey,” he said in an exaggerated manner that made it clear that he thought that thinking it was all a lot of hooey was a lot of hooey. “As far as they were concerned, the ones who feared invasion were letting anxiety run away with them, and the ones who were looking forward to benevolent intervention wanted it badly enough to let imagination run away with them. As far as those skeptics were concerned, both groups were hallucinating!”