The Watchtower (25 page)

The man looked as astonished to see Will as Will was to see him.

After a silence, Will asked, as affably as his nervousness allowed for, "Where did you come here from?"

The man glanced lovingly at the sapling, then spoke to Will in a peculiar voice. The timbre was that of leaves speaking, a fluttering with a faint rasp of bark in the background, and with a tint of wind, a tone of green that seemed to hue and ripple his words as Will heard them. Nobody could have resembled a tree less, but Will had the uncanny sense that he was listening to leaves.

"That's hard to say," his voice floated. "I don't know ... I dozed off a few hours ago in my workshed and ... where do
you
think I came from?" The man shook his head dazedly, as if the contemplation of such a question made him feel faint.

Will had a vision of a cluster of twigs in the shape of a hand, of veinlets in leaves carrying human blood. "Let's start with who you are," Will suggested. "That might tell me where you came from."

"Oh, that's simple. I'm His Majesty Henry IV's botanist, Jean Robin. Gardener extraordinaire."

Will restrained himself from laughing; he did not want this poor soul to feel humiliated. No doubt his bizarre appearance had made him an outcast, and that could be where his apparent interest in insinuating himself into the society of trees originated. As if to corroborate the thought, the brown pigeon swooped down and perched on Jean Robin's left shoulder. Then Jean Robin provided a few more details about himself. "I am the discoverer of the tree
Robinia pseudoacacia fabacees
this sapling will become. And a poet has told me that my head is the green globe around which Paris orbits."

Will nodded. "I am most impressed by your resume, Monsieur Robin." He paused, pondering what the leaflike quality in Jean Robin's voice could be. Whatever it was, Will felt he had gained an insight from hearing leaves speak. Just as atoms made matter not quite what it appeared to be, maybe distinctions between life-forms weren't quite what they seemed to be either. He wondered if Jean Robin could be a sort of bulb that had originally sprouted up from a tree root. The man's voice wafted from him like green-veined wind from treetops.
I am speaking to leaves,
Will thought.
To leaves.
Will shared this insight with the gardener.

"Likely you did come here from your shed. Or from the garden you have created. That's not surprising. You are of the leaves, Monsieur Robin. I can hear it in your voice. The very wind could have blown you here!"

Will thought Jean Robin was blushing, a faint gleam of green streaking his otherwise pinkish skin. He was certainly smiling. "You are much too kind, sir. My weight forbids such transport. Let's just leave my mode of travel to the mysteries. Life without mysteries wouldn't be much, would it? But please accept my gratitude nonetheless, sir. You must be a poet, to have conjured up ideas such as leaves talking. What sort of poems do you write?"

Jean Robin cocked his head to one side and eyed Will as if the species of a poet could be determined in the same way as a flower's, with careful observation and knowledge.

"Sonnets," Will replied emphatically. He felt suddenly that this conversation was his most joyous moment in Paris since arriving, though he knew that wasn't saying much. He leaned back, exhaled a deep breath. The fresh, blue midday sky inspired him. For the briefest of instants he felt free of his burdens. He sat upright again on the bench with relief.

"Write me a poem then, sonneteer," Jean Robin requested. "A poem that tells me where I came from."

Will found himself reciting a sonnet he'd neither written nor read. To his regret, he did not write it down, for afterward he could only recall fragments of it. The recitation itself was exhilarating. The poem seemed to come from a deep, quiet place, deeper than earth, quieter than light:

I see, one day, you'll live within a tree,

your skin turned bark, your fingers slender leaves,

your arms thick roots and branches. Wind believes,

Will continued, as crowns shimmered in a quickening breeze,

that you and woods, already now, are one. I do not flee

from such a merge of leaf and skin, a mystery

like why the moon is smaller than the sun,

or what was here the day the earth began,

or love that brings one immortality.

Jean Robin, you're well-blown here now by wind--

a deeper sort than that caressing night--

from leaf-fringed dreams, and great my pleasure to

meet you, become a sturdy lifelong friend;

I do not know just when my vigil ends,

but Marguerite is nigh! Your sign is true!

Will's mouth hung open after the last two lines because he had no idea what their logic was--how Jean Robin could be a sign of Marguerite's nearness--and expressing such optimism unnerved him; nothing was surer to jinx any hope for her than prematurely celebrating her return. But then Jean Robin's applause for the poem raised his spirits, and Will saw nearby branches were moving up and down in approbation, too, leaves quivering, maybe even the sun exhaling some extra light.

His pain over Marguerite was hardly forgotten, but for an instant peace was in his heart.

Jean Robin began to laugh while clapping, to appearances with joy and not mockery, a sound with a flute of music added to its leafery. The most singular laugh Will had ever heard.

"I too have my 'love that brings one immortality,'" Jean Robin said when he'd quieted down. He gazed with fondness again at the sapling, and for a moment Will saw tears glistening in his eyes. "All of my flowers, shrubs, and trees are precious to me, this one most of all.
Robinia
and its descendants, and
their
descendants, will live on far longer than I can. But I, their seeder, will live on through them." He fell silent, as if his store of eloquence were spent, and Will saw the wind pick up in the trees, as if that were where Jean Robin's breath had gone.

Will had to agree with him. "You are
so
right, sir, about living on that way, though it's not the sort of immortality I seek. And I don't seek mine for immortality's sake, but only because I have had the odd fortune to fall in love with an immortal and want to always be by her side. But you are of the trees and their everlastingness. That is why your words flutter to me like leaves. That is why your head reminds me of the bulb of a flower," he added hesitantly, worried Jean Robin could be offended. But Jean Robin grinned as if pleased with Will's metaphor. "You have the spirit of the trees in you. And no doubt they have your spirit in them as well!"

"As, no doubt, does the woman of whom you spoke in your sonnet have your spirit in her! Might it be that your Marguerite ... no, I shouldn't ask. It would be too intrusive of me..."

"No, go ahead. Ask!"

"Well ... ahem ... I happen to have a few acquaintances here in Paris who ... ahem ... enjoy the benefits of immortality. They are of the genus
fee,
what you English call fairies. Is your Marguerite one of them?"

"Yes!" Will exclaimed, astounded. Perhaps this strange little man was an emissary sent to lead him to Marguerite. "Yes, she is. You say you know others? Perhaps my Marguerite will be with them. Could you direct me to them?"

Jean Robin nodded his bulbous head while plucking a broken branch off the ground. "I have a dear friend, a scholar of the marine life, who should be able to direct you better. She lives in the
faubourg
Vauvert, a mile south of here, just beyond the Carthusian monastery. Her name is Madame La Pieuvre. If anyone in Paris can tell you where your beloved is, it's she. Madame La Pieuvre has her ... ahem ... hand in every pot." Jean Robin chuckled as if he'd made a brilliant joke. Will didn't quite get it, but he happily wrote down Madame La Pieuvre's name and address and promised he'd seek her out immediately.

"Good luck on your quest for immortality, young man," Jean Robin said as he bid him farewell, waving the branch in the air.

"And on yours!" Will called, glancing back at the little man. Another trick of sunlight eclipsed Jean Robin's figure for a moment, and all Will saw were swaying branches as if Jean Robin had already merged with his beloved
Robinia pseudoacacia
and thus found his own leafy immortality ahead of Will's.

He took a final glance at the steps of the church as he walked off and spied a scrap of paper there, conspicuous and unmoving despite a brisk breeze. Will could not resist a sudden urge to retrieve it.

His eyes came aglow, and he beamed more profoundly than he had when receiving Madame La Pieuvre's name and address from Jean Robin. Remarkably, this apparently random scrap of paper also had her name and address on it. Even more remarkable was the clearly recognizable handwriting the name and address were written in, one that brought elation to Will's features.

Marguerite's.

19

The Vestiges

I went straight from the Medici Column to the Gare Montparnesse, glad I'd thought to bring the Poland Spring bottle with me. As soon as I settled into my seat, I fell fast asleep. When I awoke, the train was hurtling past fields of yellow sunflowers. A turreted chateau flashed by, and the silver gleam of a river. Swans? One black and one white like in my dream? I couldn't tell for sure; the train was moving too fast. We passed more fields, some green, some tawny gold, limned by dark green rows of poplars. Old stone farmhouses, a lone tower on a hill that reminded me of something, then more buildings clotting together like beads of mercury until the countryside became outskirts and we were pulling into Poitiers.

I roused myself recalling that I only had nine minutes to switch trains. Plunging out into the chill morning air (the digital clock on the platform flashed 7:39 ... then 7:40), I scanned the station signs for the train to Lusignan, didn't see it, recalled that I had to look for the final destination on the line, which was written on a slip of paper somewhere in my bag, found it while the clock changed to 7:42, and then scanned the signs for La Rochelle Ville and saw that the train was boarding on Track 3--the other side of the station--and would be leaving in six minutes.

I raced up a flight of stairs and down another, colliding with morning commuters, a nun, and an entire troop of mud-speckled French Boy Scouts. I jumped onto a waiting train, asked breathlessly if this was the train to Lusignan, was told no, and was directed to the train on the opposite side of the platform. As I darted across the platform toward an already closing door, the strap of my backpack snagged on a metal railing, wrenching my shoulder backward and catching the watch chain around my neck. I heard the snap of metal and felt the chain slide from my neck.
Stop!
I screamed as the watch fell. For one long moment the chaos of the platform seemed to freeze: Boy Scouts arrested in the middle of hauling duffel bags to their shoulders, a nun caught midsneeze, the sweat from a train conductor's brow suspended in the air as he leaned out the window of the front car, and, directly in front of me, a figure in long black coat and wide-brimmed hat, his face in deep shadow, his hand in mid-air, reaching for the falling watch, then
touching
it. Alone of all the occupants on the platform the man in black could move, albeit slowly. His gloved hand seemed to be moving through molasses as it reached the time piece, and his fingers splayed across its complicated gears....

"Grab it!" a voice inside my head cried.

I reached out and snatched my watch out of the man's hands, my hand moving far more quickly than his.
I could move faster!
For a moment his head rose and I felt the force of his gaze on me even though I still couldn't make out his eyes. The watch, now firmly in my hand, seemed to pulse, as if the fabric of time itself was a living thing, and the watch was its beating heart. Then I unsnagged my backpack from the railing and darted past the frozen businessman, the sneezing nun, and the Boy Scouts in their soiled uniforms, and dashed through the gap in the train doors. As soon as I did, the doors slid closed behind me, and the motion inside and outside the train recommenced. A whistle blew, a voice announced the departure of the train for La Rochelle Ville, and we were moving. I looked out the glass doors to see the man in the black coat slowly turning to watch the train pull out of the station, his head swiveling to face me.

Recalling the leap he'd made over the Luxembourg gate, I kept my eyes on him until the train had cleared the platform and he was only a black smudge in the distance. Then I sat down, clutching my watch, staring at the hands placidly ticking off the time. Had it been the watch that made time stop on the platform? But how? I'd made the watch myself and I wasn't aware of endowing it with any supernatural time-stopping abilities. Still, I was glad the watch hadn't broken. I spent the rest of the trip fixing its chain with the pair of needle-nose pliers on my Swiss army knife, my mind engaged with another problem. Why had the man in the black coat followed me to Poitiers? How had he been able to move when no one else (but me) could? And was he even now following me to Lusignan?

I stared out the window uneasily at the green countryside. We'd entered a verdant valley with a river flashing below--the Vonne, I recalled from my guidebook--trees encroaching so close to the track that the car filled with a green watery light. I waited until the conductor announced Lusignan, then leaped up and out the train doors as if I were in an espionage movie trying to evade Russian spies. But no one got out with me. The platform was deserted and remained so after the train pulled out. The station--a two-story, cream stucco house with green shutters and geraniums in the window boxes--was locked and shuttered. I stood for a moment watching the train to La Rochelle Ville disappear in the distance, feeling as if I'd somehow slipped off the map of France.