Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (13 page)

My grandmother appeared in the doorway in her long white nightdress, looking like a ghost, a phantom, a white demon from an icy hell. “Don’t do that again, Caitlin,” she said. “It won’t help. You took her life away from me. So yours belongs to me. That’s only fair. Now clean up this mess.”

I screamed, “I didn’t mean what happened to Mama!”

“Meaning is an illusion,” she said and went back to bed, leaving me alone outside the window, staring at the pool of gasoline on the polished golden floor.

I drop out of school. I watch TV. I go for walks, but not very far. I read nonfiction. I’m in the kitchen, eating a ham sandwich and ignoring the dirty dishes piled in the sink, which I was supposed to wash last night, when the summons comes and I run to the library.

It’s a medieval castle, further back in time than I have been before. Knights, ladies, servants gather in a great stone hall with banners on the wall and great smoky fires. Everyone is shouting, dogs are barking; it’s chaos. Finally one huge knight climbs onto a trestle table and makes himself heard above everybody else.

“Now we have been served this day of what meats and drinks we thought on; but one thing beguiled us, we might not see the Holy Grail, it was so preciously covered. Wherefore I will make here avow, that to-morn, without longer abiding, I shall labor in the quest of the Sangreal, that I shall hold me out a twelvemonth and a day, or more if need be, and never shall I return again unto the court till I have seen it more openly than it hath been seen here; and if I may not speed I shall return again as he that may not be against the will of our Lord Jesu Christ.”

More shouting. The king—Arthur?—rises from a throne at the head of the table. Everybody falls silent. The king says, “Alas, said King Arthur unto Sir Gawaine, ye have nigh slain me with the vow and promise that ye have made; for through ye have bereft me the fairest fellowship and the truest of knighthood that ever were seen together in any realm of the world; for when they depart from hence I am sure they all shall never meet more in this world, for they shall die many in the quest. And so it forthinketh me a little, for I have loved them as well as my life, wherefore it shall grieve me right sore, the departition of this fellowship.”

“Girl,” says a man in rough brown wool, “Get ye to yer work!”

I do, while the knights argue and the ladies weep and the king keeps saying, “Gawaine, Gawaine, ye have set me in great sorrow.”

I am there eleven days. One hundred and fifty knights leave on the quest for the Holy Grail. A religious prophet turns up to say that no lady may go on the quest because all women are unclean, which puts the ladies in a more foul mood than they already were by the departure of their men. And I am left behind with them. Guenevere is the worst, alternately crying and raging at Arthur, at her women, at the servants.

Not that I see much of her. I thought servants’ lives in David Copperfield and Middlemarch were hard— but this! Only Les Misérables had been worse.

Rough labor from way before dawn to after dark. Sleeping huddled on dirty straw in an unheated room, packed together for warmth in a cold winter. I get chilblains on my hands, which fester and burst, making it an agony to touch anything. The food is ample enough, but very poor: gruel with the dead insects from the grain bins still in it, bread so hard I chip a tooth. I lose weight, am cuffed alongside the head by the kitchen women, am screamed at by a lady who smells almost as bad as I do. One evening, a male servant is flogged bloody in the outer ward. I never learn what he did.

Almost, I am glad to return to the library, although I stare at the books on their orderly shelves with hatred.

“Welcome back,” Grandmother says, polishing a brass tray inlaid with silver. She and my mother brought it back from their summer trip to Morocco.

“It isn’t right to punish me like this,” I gasp. “It was an accident!”

She doesn’t answer.

I begin to think about suicide.

The next time, I don’t recognize the place, or the people. I stand on the wide veranda of a house perched on rocks above a cold sea, dull green-gray and restless. The house, weathered gray, looms four stories above me. I shiver, not knowing what to do, until a young, handsome man in Levis comes out of the front door, holding a coffee cup. He has strong shoulders and a weak chin.

“Oh—you the girl from the village? To help clean for the party?” And then I know that I am. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, go on inside, you’re shivering. Tackie’s in the kitchen and he’ll tell you what needs doing.” He drains his coffee cup, sets it on the veranda railing, and bounds down the steps toward a sporty red Jaguar. I take the coffee cup into the kitchen. It’s warmed by an oldfashioned stove. A boy sits at the table, eating sugary cereal. The boy looks up.

“Are you Tackie? I’m the girl from the village here to—”

“Clean, I know.” He smiles, an unhappy smile. “Mama said you should first clean the bedrooms on the second floor for Aunt May and Aunt Julia. They’re coming here to help with the party.”

“Okay. Will you show me which rooms they are? And where the cleaning supplies are?”

“Sure.” When he gets up, I see how thin he is. “What’s your name?”

“Katie.”

“I’m Tackman Babcock.”

He brings a book with him, a thick and heavy book, old looking. I can’t see the title. The rooms I’m supposed to clean are thick with dust, as if no one has been in them for months. They smell musty. I throw open the windows, dust and mop and find linens for the beds, remove old ashes from the fireplaces. The stationery on the desk is headed “HOUSE of 31 FEBRUARY,” which makes no sense. I take the small rag rugs outside to shake them, since there seems to be no vacuum cleaner. Tackie is on the front porch, huddled in a sheepskin jacket, reading.

I say, “Aren’t you cold?”

He looks up vaguely, snapped too suddenly from the world of his book, uncertain for a moment where he is. I recognize that feeling, from back when books were a delight to me. He says, “Oh. Katie. Did you talk to Mama?”

“No. Where is she?”

“In the kitchen. She wants to see you.”

Mrs. Babcock is there with the handsome young man named Jason, and his hand is on her breast. When I come in he removes it, but not very fast. She is pretty, dressed in a silk bathrobe too light for the weather. I know immediately that she is on something. Her pupils are big as dimes, and she has that bright, jerky way of talking.

“Oh, Katie! There you are! If you could start with the bedrooms for my sister and sister-in-law, who—”

“I already did those, ma’am.”

“Oh! Of course you did—silly me! Tackie told me. Well, then, the other rooms. Whatever looks like it needs doing.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jason ignores me. I’m not surprised; I’m not pretty. Jason is just as transparent to me as Mrs. Babcock is.

I spend the rest of the day cleaning. The work is easy. Hot running water! Toilet brushes! Windex! Grandmother must be slipping.

In the late afternoon I go back downstairs. Mrs. Babcock and Jason have disappeared into her bedroom. Tackie has reclaimed the kitchen, reading at the table.

I say, “What about dinner?”

“Dinner?” he says, as if the word is Sanskrit.

“Yes . . . dinner. Who usually cooks it?”

“Nobody.”

I find the pantry and old-fashioned refrigerator well stocked. Tackie actually looks up from his book as I fry lamb chops, fix mashed potatoes, cook frozen green beans. His little mouth hangs open in astonishment and anticipation. I take a tray up to Mrs. Babcock and Jason. She, too, is astonished.

“Well, damn,” Jason says, eyes on the lamb chops.

Tackie and I eat in the kitchen. He is a very silent child. Outside, the sea surges rhythmically in a rising wind. Finally I say, “What are you reading?”

He pauses, fork halfway to his mouth, as if this is a dangerous question. He says, “A book.”

“What’s it about?”

“Stuff.”

“Can I see?”

Obediently, reluctantly, he hands it over. The pages are tinted yellow, a few dog-eared. The Island of Doctor Death. I hold back my snort; this is a long way from Anna Karenina. I glance at a random paragraph, and the kitchen disappears.

I am in another castle, standing in a stone corridor beside an open door. Inside the room a man in evening clothes stands beside another man strapped onto a table. The second man is naked; the first looks over him and straight at me. I run; there is no shout to halt, no pursuit. At the end of the corridor something comes around the corner and I scream.

It doesn’t seem to hear. Huge, shaggy, half man and half beast, it lumbers past as if I don’t exist, heading for the room I just fled. What the fuck?

Cautiously I tiptoe back down the stone corridor. Condensation drips from the walls. Standing outside the room, I hear the book’s dialogue.

“Do you mean that you made these monsters?”

“Made them? Did God make Eve, Captain, when he took her from Adam’s rib? Or did Adam make the bone and God alter it to become what he wished? Look at it this way, Captain. I am God and Nature is Adam.”

A hunchbacked . . . thing ambles past me and into the room. It doesn’t see me any more than the first monster had, or the naked man, or the crazy torturer. Here, I am invisible. Pure observer.

So I observe. I watch Bruno, the former St. Bernard, free Captain Ransom. I watch Ransom in turn rescue the impossibly gorgeous girl Talar: Gisele Bündchen crossed with a Barbie doll. I watch her tell him about “a city older than civilization, buried in the jungle here on this little island,” and I laugh aloud at the sheer exuberant schlockiness of Tackie’s book. I watch them escape the castle of Dr. Death and set out for Lemuria.

Am I stuck in this book?

For a while, I don’t care. I’m not hungry, not used like a slave, not beaten. Not even seen. Most of all, and for the first time since my mother died, I’m not afraid—until I realize I might be trapped here for good. Will my grandmother’s black arts work if I am in a book within a book? Can I get out?

The moment I think that, I’m back in the kitchen of the House of 31 February, and Tackie has just started on his third lamb chop. I had chosen the moment of return, willing myself out of the story.

“Tackie,” I say shakily, “do . . . do you ever go inside your book? Go where Captain Ransom and Bruno and Talar and the others are?”

He picks up a forkful of mashed potatoes drenched in too much butter. “No,” he says, not looking at me, his thin little face flushed, “but sometimes the book people come out to me. I don’t go in.” But I had. Ransom hadn’t come into the tale of the House of February 31; I had gone into his. Maybe because Tackie is already a character in a story, and I am not? Before I can ask Tackie anything else, I’m back in Grandmother’s library.

She is rearranging the collection of ivory and jade figurines that she and my mother bought in Thailand. Fabulously expensive, they sit on the library mantel, flanked by tall cherry bookshelves of leather-bound classics. “Welcome back, Caitlin,” Grandmother says.

I am not as innocent as Tackie. I am experienced with this evil old woman. More important, I have had days of calm, safe invisibility: time to think and plan.

“No,” I scream as if in pain, writhing on the floor. “No, please, Grandmother . . . not there, not again!” I burst into tears. It is surprisingly easy. “Send me to Les Misérables rather than there!”

She pauses, an exquisite carved Kinnaree goddess statue in her hand, her face first surprised and then sly. “It was difficult?” she says with mock, razored sympathy.

I sob louder.

I knew there was no chance she would ever have read The Island of Doctor Death.

My mother died when I was not quite thirteen. She had taken me downtown to shop for school clothes, a once-a-year expedition I always looked forward to with hungry longing. For one whole glorious afternoon I would have her complete attention. Me, not Grandmother, with whom Mother spent most days talking, laughing, and traveling, always traveling on Grandmother’s trust fund while I stayed home with a succession of uncaring maids and a picture of the dead father I couldn’t remember.

We picked out boots at Nordstrom, skirts at Saks, tops at a trendy place for teens. “After all,” Mother said gaily, “you’re going into junior high!” We stepped off the curb, both of us laden with packages. A silver Lexus sped around the corner, going too fast. Mother dropped her packages and shoved me out of the way. She was killed instantly.

At the wake I clutched a book, my only escape from grief, and my grandmother stared at me across the open coffin. That was the first time the icy wind blew into my mind.

What if entering Tackie’s novel was a freak occurrence, something that never happens again?

The next day, I attack Grandmother with a fireplace poker. I can’t reach her, of course; it’s not like I haven’t tried before. She shoots me a look of contempt, the summons comes, and I’m back on the veranda of the House of 31 February. But Tackie, clutching his book, is leaving. He’s climbing into a car with a middle- aged woman and a gray-haired man, who carries his suitcase. The drug- addicted mother and slimy boyfriend are already gone. Only a pair of Tackie’s aunts are left, May and Julie, and they don’t stay long, either.

There are no other books anywhere in that huge, once majestic house. Only a stack of girlie magazines and a crushed cigarette pack in what I assume was Jason’s bedroom. And I can’t leave the house. I wander it, a ghost in a story that’s already over, for three long days before Grandmother yanks me back.

This time I smile, stretch, and go to shower without speaking to her.

Next time it will not be The Island of Doctor Death.

I don’t know what it will be. But Tackie Babcock is not the only fictional character who reads. I think of Marianne Dashwood praising Cowper, reading Shakespeare with Colonel Brandon. Of Anna Karenina, bending over book after book at Vozdvizhenskoe. Of Jane Eyre, reading away her loneliness at Gateshead Hall and Lowood Institute and Thornfield. Even in Les Misérables, although Fantine could not read, Cosette did. All I would have to do was find Cosette and dive into her book. Or anyone else’s.