Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  Christopher called “kitty, kitty” just a few times, and when no cat came to him he breathed in and tried to enjoy the moist air as he stood on the boardwalk. He frowned when he looked out at the water and spotted a bit of rubbish floating in the Dart. He’d have to go down to the dock, lean out between a small red leisure sailboat and an old fishing boat that looked like it might rust through, and fetch it out.

  It wasn’t until he was on the dock and lying on his stomach, halfway eased out over the water, that he wondered if there really was something out there. He stretched until the wet paper wrapper was just within his reach and caught it with his index and middle finger. It was a Munchies candy wrapper, bright red and a bit waxy.

  Returning to the shop, Christopher turned the lights on and went to the trash bin behind the front counter. He examined the register to make sure it was locked properly. He wanted to go back out, intended to lock up for the rest of the day, but as he was checking that everything was settled behind the register the front door opened and a customer entered. It was William.

  “Afternoon, Christopher.”

  “William. Glad to see you. Did you remember anything more about that cat?”

  “What cat is that, Christopher? The toy cat? No, no. I’ve come in to look at your books.”

  William made his way into the stacks, then came over by the register. He moved his lips as he read Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American and leaned on the spinner rack.

  “Uh, William?”

  “Yes, lad?”

  “The spinner won’t bear up. It’s not meant to hold more than books.”

  There were rules to running a bookstore, rules to being a customer, and sometimes it seemed William didn’t understand any of them. A few weeks back he’d come in at two o’clock, found a copy of a book that seemed interesting to him, and spent three hours leaning against the stacks and reading Charley Weaver’s Letters From Mamma. Now William was going to keep Christopher in the shop for another afternoon of browsing.

  He wanted to ask the old man again about Hodge, but he didn’t know what to ask. The two of them had made the same mistake, or had had the same hallucination, but how could they talk about it or make sense of it?

  While he waited for William to finish up he thought of the Munchies wrapper in the bin. Someone had just tossed their garbage into the Dart. People were losing their grip on the niceties that made life work in Devon. It had something to do with pop music and television. He considered the Munchies wrapper and wondered if it was, in fact, still there. He tried to remember what was on the Munchies label. Something about a crisp at the centre and toffee?

  Christopher reached under the register, into the waste bin, and was relieved to pull out the Munchies wrapper. It was still there.

  “‘Milk chocolate with soft caramel and crisp biscuit centre,’” he read.

  William moved away from the novels to the aisle with popular science books. He thumbed through a guidebook for mushroom identification and then picked up Kinsey’s book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

  “That one is for reading at home I think. Would you like it?” He dreaded the idea of old William standing around in the store for hours reading about erections, fellatio, and masochism.

  “This fellow died young, didn’t he?” William asked.

  “Depends on your definitions.”

  “Can’t bring this one home. That would be a scandal. Besides, I wouldn’t want the wife reading up on all the ways I was deficient.”

  “I see. Is there anything then? You’d said there was a book you wanted?”

  William looked up at Christopher, a bit surprised. “You’re eager to look for Hodge again, Chris?”

  Christopher let out a breath and then told William no. He wasn’t going anywhere. Then, rather than continue on with that, Christopher held the candy wrapper up in the light and considered it again. He put the candy wrapper back into the trash bin, pushed the bin under the register and out of view, and then took it out again to check the wrapper was still there and still the same. He picked up the trash bin and repeated this several more times. In and out. It was somehow satisfying. He felt reassured each time, back and forth. He felt relieved until it dawned on him what he was doing.

  Chris was acting out a scene from one of his father’s stories. In the first Pooh book there had been a scene just like this only with a popped balloon and not a Munchies wrapper. In the story the stuffed donkey, Eeyore, had felt better about his ruined birthday once he realized that a deflated balloon could fit inside an empty honey jar. And now, in an effort to prove that he was sane, Christopher was repeating this same simple action.

  “‘He was taking the balloon out, and putting it back again, as happy as could be,’” Christopher said.

  “What’s that?” William asked.

  How had Christopher arrived at this? He was reenacting his father’s stories in order to convince himself that the world was real?

  “Maybe I could find a secret spot for it,” William said.

  “What’s that?”

  The old man put Kinsey’s book on the counter. And Christopher was struck by something like déjà vu for the second time that day.

  The red-and-white cover, the way the words “Based on surveys made by members of the University of the State of Indiana” fit together above the title, it matched the design on the Munchies wrapper. Christopher took the wrapper out of the waste bin and unfolded it on the counter so it was set down flat next to Kinsey’s red book.

  “‘Milk chocolate with soft caramel and crisp biscuit centre.’” He read the words again.

  “What’s that?”

  Christopher felt some anxiety looking at the juxtaposition, a little like he was underwater and trying to get to the surface. He was not quite drowning, not yet, but air seemed a long way off.

  “Nothing,” Christopher said.

  “Hmmm?”

  Christopher took William’s money and put the book in a brown paper bag. Then he took the Munchies wrapper out of the waste bin and put it in the cash register just to be sure.

  2

  While Christopher was coping with toy cats, Munchies wrappers, and Kinsey’s report on sexual behavior in the human male, a ten-year-old boy in Paris, a boy named Gerrard Hand, decided that he was dreaming, during a field trip to the police station at Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. He discovered that, in dreams, the past is hidden inside the present. It happened when he was on the third floor of the police museum.

  Charles de Gaulle looked down from the glass walls of the police station through painted eyes, and Gerrard could tell that the president knew something. De Gaulle knew the secret, the thing that Papa had done to himself, the thing that neither his mama nor his nana would talk about.

  The dozen or so boys and girls from Ménilmontant school stood near the elevators in a chamber separated from the front desk of the police station, from the policemen with their batons and guns, by walls of safety glass. These walls were painted white and displayed life-sized illustrations of civic heroes. Three of the four figures were generic—a fireman, a policeman, a teacher—but the last figure was Charles de Gaulle.

  Gerrard moved to the front of the line, made sure that he was with the first group into the elevator, with the little blond girls whom the teacher liked. His teacher, Mme. Mertfield, made the rest of the boys wait for the second elevator because they had to learn to be quiet and still, but Gerrard stepped into the elevator and was at the first exhibit before there could be any objection.

  Gerrard considered the words “Precision, Clarity, Security,” the motto that had defined the new role of the police lieutenant in Louis XIV’s army. He examined the foppish mannequin dressed in a royal blue uniform with gold trim.

  The history of the police and the policing of history began with this: a bicorn or two-cornered hat like the one Napoleon would adopt poised neatly on the head of an army-man dressed in finery. But then Gerrard read about other possible starting points. The police might’ve started
with the establishment of troops to keep the peace in 1521 or in 1224 with Saint Louis’ Knights of the Watch. The Knights of the Watch’s motto was “He watches so others may rest.”

  When Gerrard’s father had come home from the hospital the first time, Gerrard had resented him. His father had been away for eight months and had become legend to Gerrard, but then when he’d come back to their three-room apartment in the Ménilmontant neighborhood, their daily pattern behind the reinforced concrete walls of the building shifted. For instance, the centre point in the orbit of his mother’s attention changed. Pierre would shamble out of the bedroom in his pajamas at random times and Gerrard’s mother would bring him medicine and coffee. He had to take pills.

  “I’m working on reality,” his father said, “but the world won’t meet me halfway.”

  Gerrard’s father’s curly black hair was always greasy, and he didn’t focus but smoked one cigarette after another, knocking ash into his coffee or across his toast with strawberry jam. He’d been a bartender as well as a painter but he said he didn’t think he could work again.

  “What did they do to you in that hospital?” his mother asked. “When are you going to be a husband to me or a father to your son?”

  In the police museum Gerrard admired a glass case displaying brass knuckles and knives of every type: switchblade, ivory handled, serrated. He looked at sharp triangular blades on finger rings, and at a set of hooks and ropes, as the tour guide explained that the police evolved at the same rate of speed as the rest of society. In fact, the tour guide explained that police work and the scientific methods the police employed had pushed the general population toward civilization.

  The tour guide led the young students away from the display cases of torture equipment and around the corner to a series of framed photographs. These were set so high on the wall that the children had to crane their necks to see.

  “Here we see how the police trained dogs to sniff out criminals and give chase. Notice how these photographs are in a sequence: First the dog discovers the man and forces him out of his hiding place in the wooden shed. Second the police dog chases the man, forcing him to climb to safety, in this case a nearby wood pillar inside the police grounds that gives the criminal a way to elevate himself. But then, behold, the third picture shows the policeman arriving. The policeman whistles to the dog, giving instruction, and the job is complete,” the tour guide said.

  Gerrard turned away from the sequence and looked at the tour guide. He was a short, thin young man who looked very clean in his thick wool overcoat and with his smartly combed hair. The guide was telling the story of the police, starting over at the beginning, starting with “once upon a time.”

  The police appeared alongside kings and queens. It began with the absolutes of royalty and torture. Early justice was severe. For instance, criminals were sometimes crushed and pierced in a latticework of hinged spikes, or mauled and hung by their ankles while hooks ripped their flesh, and many more were simply beheaded in the guillotine.

  But, Gerrard only found out that he was dreaming, that maybe he was always dreaming whether he was in bed asleep, awake at school, or at the police museum, when he came across the Bertillon system of cataloging and categorizing police photographs. Gerrard examined the faces of criminals from the nineteenth century, and at the details that were used to distinguish the people, one from another. One might have a large nose, another a prominent chin.

  He remembered the last day he’d spent with Pierre, with his father. They’d visited the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and a little park on Île de la Grande Jatte. Papa had taken a day off from bartending, he was finally working again, but he’d skipped out to take Gerrard “to see the light on the island.” Dressed in a three-piece navy suit and a gray fedora maybe he’d looked a bit like the men in the police photos even without a handlebar mustache or a prominent chin. He’d had the same blank eyes.

  When they’d boarded the Metro his father had pointed to the curved lamps that illuminated the platform, to the spots of reflected light on the tile ceiling above them, and asked Gerrard how long it would take for the train to move away from the light.

  Gerrard didn’t really understand the question. “How far?” he asked.

  Pierre pointed to the curved ceiling above the Metro platform and explained. To move away, from point a to point b, would take forever because there were an infinite number of points in between.

  “It’s Zeno’s paradox. He was a philosopher and he used the example of an arrow in flight instead of a Metro car. He said that an arrow as it takes flight should freeze in place because in any given instant in time an arrow can either move to where it already is, or it can move to where it is not. But it can’t move to where it isn’t because we’re talking about a single instant. So in any given moment there is no movement,” his father said.

  “How far?”

  When they arrived Gerrard squinted and raised his hand to block out the light. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the Metro tunnels.

  The island was crowded with people, but Gerrard felt there was enough room. There were open spaces between the trees, and there was space between the men in their long beige coats and the women in their high heels and long synthetic skirts. His papa told Gerrard that the strolling day trippers in the park could be and had in fact already been reduced to dots of light, pure color.

  His father found a tree to sit under and opened a bottle of Merlot he’d brought along in his briefcase. He drank from it steadily and read from the newspaper L’Humanité while Gerrard drifted. Gerrard hid behind trees and pretended to shoot Nazis and Indians.

  “Keep an eye out for a woman with an umbrella, or a soldier with a bugle,” his papa said. He also told him that after a visit to Île de la Grande Jatte there could be no going back to the regular way Gerrard saw the world. Then he poured more wine.

  “May I try a taste, Papa?” Gerrard asked.

  There was nothing left but the dregs and Papa sucked those down and then produced two wineglasses and another bottle from his briefcase. Papa lit a cigarette and poured a quarter of a glass of wine for him, but before he gave the cup over Papa took a sip himself, so that the glass was only an eighth of the way full.

  Gerrard took a sip. The wine tasted good and he downed the rest in one go. When he stood and wandered in a circle around the maple tree he felt off balance. Through the thick green grass Gerrard spun in circles, holding his arms out to his sides. He spun faster, and then faster still.

  “You dizzy yet, son?”

  Gerrard stopped spinning and tried to stand perfectly still, but the earth came rushing up at him, at a right angle under his feet, and pulled him off balance. It felt like there was a spring underground that had been released.

  * * *

  Gerrard remembered this as he listened to the tour guide explain how the police gave the children freedom. His father had gone away. No, that wasn’t really it. His father was dead, and now he was alone. Gerrard was a little boy who was neither well behaved enough to be admired by adults nor tough and wily enough to be admired by his peers.

  Gerrard remembered his father and looked at the exhibits in the police museum. The tour guide arranged the children in a line so they could get their pictures taken. He explained that Alphonse Bertillon had developed a method of filing mug shots, a system of measuring facial features, and a method for photographing crime scenes.

  “Bertillon changed the way police work was done in the twentieth century,” the tour guide said. He grabbed a wooden stool and dragged it alongside the accordion lens of the special camera and then set it down in front. This was where the children were to sit.

  Gerrard was at the back of the line next to a wax reproduction of Henri-Jacques Pranzini’s decapitated head. In 1888 Pranzini had been convicted of the murder of three young women and put to death by guillotine. Gerrard felt a coldness on his back and in his stomach as he glanced nervously at the wax head and read the placard on the display case.

&nb
sp; Pranzini had gained his victims’ confidence by posing as a doctor.

  On the island his father had poured Gerrard another glass of wine after the first one and then made him settle down in the grass and sit still so he could listen to a story.

  “You’ve been working on your English?” he asked.

  “Mama says I don’t have to learn it yet.”

  “You should learn to speak English.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “I won’t be around to help you later. You’ll have to do a lot, everything, on your own. But now, today, I’ll help you. There are a lot of good stories in English, and this is one of them.”

  The House at Pooh Corner didn’t start with an introduction but with a contradiction, because it was the second Pooh book and so there was no need for another introduction, because when they asked the animals in the stories what the opposite of an introduction was they were told that it was, of course, just a contradiction. Also the second Pooh book started with a contradiction because it turned out that the very best Pooh stories were the ones that were dreamed up by Christopher Robin when he was sleeping, dreamed up while Pooh, his stuffed bear, sat by his bed thinking grand thoughts about nothing, but Christopher Robin could never remember any of those.

  “One day when Pooh was walking in the Forest, there were one hundred and seven cows on a gate…” No, you see, we have lost it. It was the best, I think. Well, here are some of the other ones, all that we shall remember now. But, of course, it isn’t really Good-bye, because the Forest will always be there … and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it.

  Gerrard leaned against the tree while his father read aloud, first in English and then, translating as he read, in French.

  In the police museum, one of the noisy boys, a freckled kid with brown hair and a sly grin, sat on the wooden stool as the tour guide continued on about fingerprints and surveillance. The tour guide put his finger in the air to interrupt himself, ducked beneath the dark cloth, and the boy smiled as the camera flashed. Next the tour guide removed the negative from the back of the camera and loaded another.