I presumed that Birgitta would calm down in time and her storming holy rage would quieten, and after five months that was it: she phoned me, embarrassed, and told me that she had no more strength any longer to attack the windmills. I said that as far as I was concerned the mills could turn and the trains could move, what had happened could not be undone.
When Rupert woke up he did not recognize Birgitta. He just stared at the walls of his hospital room, ill at ease, twiddled his thumbs and finally asked Birgitta, who was trembling by the bed, if ma’am happened to have any “Chicago” chewing gum with her, please.
“And that damned brand of chewing gum hasn’t even been produced for years!” Birgitta sighed when we sat in the hospital cafeteria and wondered at the turn things had taken.
The doctors had said that Rupert would never remember Birgitta, not really. The part of Rupert’s brain where all the memories of Birgitta had been located had suffered irreparably serious damage.
“As far as I am concerned he is then sort of dead,” the unhappy fiancée stated, and since I could invent no reasonable counter-argument to that, I stuffed my mouth full of the bun I’d bought in the canteen.
Besides the Birgitta-memories the destroyed bit of his brain had stored Rupert’s whole legal learning and some other rather important matters. Rupert did remember me, though. Just after the chewing gum, Rupert had started to ask for his mother. And he remembered the Lola brand of chocolate (although that was also out of production, as we later found out to Rupert’s regret) and Donald Duck and trains and the death of his father and all the nightmares of his childhood. Actually he remembered everything quite excellently—up to his ninth year.
For understandable reasons the engagement lapsed. Rupert returned to the home of his childhood. He had spent altogether six months in the hospital. During the while, the summery land had shrivelled up in the leafless squeeze of winter.
It took time to get used to the creature who wandered in silence around my house from one room to another. He didn’t speak much, just sometimes asked me to bring some sweets from the shop or inquired after his things long since discarded. It was Rupert, and it was not. It was some kind of an anachronistic person: the being had the exterior of the grown-up lawyer-Rupert and the frightened eyes and mind of the child-Rupert already once left behind. It kept watching the courtyard out of the windows nervously cracking its finger joints and sneaking around like a ghost. It brooded over thoughts hidden from me. It was scared of its own image in the mirrors since that had become unfamiliar and strange to it.
I’d have screamed if I’d have had the energy for such behaviour, but I was tired and apathetic and thought I’d never have the strength any more for any dashing enterprises. The air I breathed was thin and stuffy.
“Rupert,” I said finally. “It can’t go on like this for much longer. Something has to happen. Something.”
I didn’t know myself what I was actually trying to say, and certainly I’d been speaking more to myself than to my son, but the anachronistic Rupert looked at me and nodded as if he had known exactly what I meant.
Months passed outside the house. Inside it the time had at first stopped and then gone definitely haywire when the anachronistic Rupert returned home.
I stayed at home with Rupert. I didn’t even see Miriam except a few times in passing: in the supermarket, out in the village, on the road, at the watchmaker’s. Sometimes I doubted whether we had ever known each other, so distant we had become. I didn’t ask her for a visit, and she was intelligent enough not to come without invitation. I simply lacked the energy to talk to people, to explain all the time to myself and to others Rupert’s present appearance and situation and the type of his brain damage; I couldn’t stand people’s empathetic, watery looks; I did not want to see my son through strange pitying eyes that made me only feel miserable and sorry for someone who but a moment ago had been a successful lawyer but now was something else completely.
I have never been a regular guest to the Houndbury parties or otherwise particularly sociable, and now I froze even my scant relations with the local people to a polite level of Seasons’ Greetings. I did not want to look at people’s eyes and realize that nowadays I was “the poor mother of that disabled lawyer” rather than Ms Emma Nightingale. I did not want my son, “that disabled lawyer”, to become one of the established Houndbury oddities. I had to find out something that would help both Rupert and myself to cope with the new situation, I had to find some meaningful solution to it, and I wanted to do that alone, in my own peace.
In the first week of February, Miriam turned up for a surprise visit.
She had dyed her beautiful golden hair profoundly red. She had put on some weight, but a slight roundness became her and made her look more sensuous than ever. My sensuality, however, was waning. My black hair had acquired quite a lot of grey during the last weeks, and some strange unconscious idea had made me keep my hair short after Rupert’s skull fracture. I’d even lost weight, and had by and by started to notice the first real signs of old age in myself (and only now, bitterly, was I able to distinguish them from the earlier signs of maturity).
We hugged, and then we kissed, too, although no longer as lovers but as friends, and I thought I felt the light taste of farewell on her lips. We had a cup of coffee, ate some salt crackers and made some small talk.
Miriam was wondering about the burglary on the Tykebend road construction site; some amount of dynamite had gone missing, and teachers had been told to keep an eye on their pupils in case some of them turned out to have explosives in their desks or bags. I reminded her that it was by no means the first time something like that happened around Houndbury, lately some explosives had been stolen.
We were appalled by today’s immoral little creepy-crawlies. The stolen explosives had either been sold on, or else there was a rather big cache somewhere close by—very soon a part of Houndbury would surely fly off in the four winds, we prophesied (and I at least was secretly pleased with the idea).
I asked whether Miriam was still writing her short stories, and she said she was soon going to send some by mail to the publisher. She inquired politely if perhaps I’d like to take a look at her writings and give my opinion. I declined the honour, I didn’t understand one whit about fiction since I read only factual material.
Suddenly Rupert came out of his room to greet his former teacher. As usual, he wore a white shirt, a waistcoat, a Donald Duck tie and a pair of grey trousers (although he didn’t really feel comfortable in those, as would no nine-year-old boy). At first he sounded thoroughly sensible, even grown-up-like, and Miriam glanced at me with a glad surprised smile: So what’s supposed to be wrong with him? her eyes asked. Then Rupert blew the impression up when he started to ask Miriam about how far behind he was in his math lessons: how many pages had the rest of the class gone ahead while he’d been in the hospital? And could the teacher possibly give him some extra tutoring, for he’d been having difficulties with fractions.
Miriam snatched her handbag, spluttered some bye-byes and rushed out of the house eyes wet, and left the anachronistic Rupert staring after her in wonder.
The night noises of the trains made Rupert fall out of his bed, and quite often he had to be patched up with Band-Aids—a grown-up man falls out of bed much harder than a little boy. He stayed very much inside. That was alright with me, I didn’t want him to go and be mocked and stoned by the neighbourhood kids.
Always on Wednesdays, Rupert went out to the mailbox and came back looking disappointed, and when I finally paid proper notice I realized he was expecting his Donald Duck comics.
I didn’t know whether I was acting wisely, but anyway I subscribed to the comics again for him after a break of twenty years (although the day the comics came out had been changed to Thursdays, which gave Rupert diarrhea). I saw neither grounds nor reason any more to control what he was reading, doing or watching. As far as Rupert’s imagination was considered, he now had to cope with it himself. Not for a second time could I manage t
o launch a major offensive against fantasy—my war was over, my inner dinosaur was buried under the avalanche of all that had happened and in the pressure, changed to oil muddying my insides.
Sometimes Rupert leafed through books he found on the shelves: encyclopaedias and biographies and a thick anthology of poetry that probably was a present from Miriam. A couple of times I saw in Rupert’s hands that first law book he had learnt by heart; he fingered it uncertainly and then always put it away without opening it.
I don’t know how much my son understood of the books he studied or about what had happened to him. Sometimes he seemed like the intelligent and clever lawyer he had been only a few months before, and then he was again a big confused child who wore Armani suits and five hundred mark ties and could ponder for hours the story of “Square Eggs” he had read in the Duck comics. Those two sides seemed to compete over territory inside him, and mostly he was somewhere in between.
Now and then Rupert drew strange little pictures, which he tore up immediately and burned in the sauna oven. I got the impression that he was trying to draw Birgitta and other things he had lost with the accident, things that now only haunted him as vague dream images.
The old Timex had again found its place on his wrist, although I had to go and buy a new, longer strap for it from the Houndbury Watch – since he could not really believe that the golden Rolex glittering in the chest drawer actually belonged to him.
All that dissolved into a sleepy anticipation-filled dormancy which was held together only by the ticking of the clocks, the repetitive daily routines and my belief that something would happen. Something that would give me the keys to a solution, a way out from the deadlocked dream I couldn’t possibly imagine continuing endlessly the same (as unfounded as such a subjective notion of course was, objectively considered).
March came, with harsh nightly colds. The ribs of the house cracked in the squeeze of coldness, and sometimes just before falling asleep I imagined that the walls were breaking to splinters around me and winter was rushing in and freezing me into a rigid naked statue in my bed. I dreamed of a terrible cold that rolled over me.
Now and then I woke up and did not know who or where I was—I had to sneak around the house and go look at the sleeping Rupert and look over the objects I found for evidence to be able to locate myself back in my own life.
On the last week of the month, on the night between Thursday and Friday at 01:12 in the morning, I woke up to muffled sounds of departure seeping to my ears through the floorboards.
Rupert had slipped out at night before, but each time I had noticed it only afterwards from his wet shoes and the trails left in the snow. Through the clogged ducts of my mind gushed a sudden excitement that quickened even my numb flesh—I yanked a thick housecoat over myself and dashed down the cold stairs.
I threw the front door open. Rupert stood in the courtyard with skis and sticks in his hands and with a rucksack on his back and stared at me. He may have been a little scared for thinking he would be scolded, but at the same time I could sense unusual determination in him—it was just a fact that he was leaving somewhere and I could do absolutely nothing about it.
That was all right by me.
I let the icy black night air fill my lungs and soak into my bloodstream. The sky spreading above us seemed to open directly to the cold halls of space. The stars were skimping on their scant light, but in the middle of them the Moon hunched big and bright and yet grieving for its imagined imperfection: only after a couple of nights would it be perfectly round and beautiful and could really wallow in its own light. The cold made the black-and-white night scene crackle and pop as if it were the plateful of rice crispies in thick cream and sugar that Rupert ate in the mornings.
I shivered in my housecoat and we stared at each other without words, Rupert and I, and then I broke the silence: “Don’t worry, you aren’t going to become mink food.” (I remembered my threat from over twenty years back, and so probably did Rupert, because he looked relieved.)
“Besides, the old Traphollow died in a heart attack last fall when he was hunting rabbits and we have a new policeman, too, whom I wouldn’t try to bribe for his silence. But why don’t you wait a little before you start. This time I’m coming with you if you don’t mind. Who knows: perhaps I’ll be a ferroequinologist, too.”
Rupert seemed to frown thoughtfully under his broad rimmed Stetson but then he nodded. The hems of his grey Burberry were sweeping the ground. He had wrapped a medium length red muffler round his neck and covered his ears with black earmuffs. He didn’t at all look like a brain damaged man who thought like a nine-year old. He looked like a gentleman who was going to take a breath of fresh air after an evening of theatre, then afterwards have a nightcap, read a few lines of Dostoyevsky and withdraw to his bed.
I dressed as quickly as I could, found my skiing shoes, locked the house and fetched my old skis from the woodshed where they had spent the last twenty years. Then we started skiing in the blocked lightlessness of the forest, the son ahead with coat hems flapping and the mother behind, stumbling in her slippery skis and with the unfamiliar sticks.
The hard packed snow led us forward with unreal lightness between the high pine pillars, and time passed. Now and then I peeked at my watch, ticking deeper and deeper into the night. Rupert was faster than I, he positively flew in front of me, but luckily he stopped at times to wait for his clumsier fellow skier.
I quickly lost my sense of direction. That was all right by me: I didn’t actually want to think about where we were going—or why. On the surface, I stuck to the explanation that I was taking care of Rupert, at last thoroughly showing him that his train fantasies were nothing but misguided imagination. I dared not be honest with myself, admit that I was acting purely by intuition. After all, intuition is nothing but a kind of psychological coin flipped in the air. And to manage important business by intuition is just about as sensible as choosing the right road by flipping a coin (as those irrational ducks did in one of Rupert’s favourite stories). But that night I for a moment stepped outside reason, maybe just to see at least a glimpse of what was there; for this one and only time I felt an urgent intuitive need to follow my son on his irrational trip to the core of fantasy.
We partly circled and partly crossed over the massive cliffs of Sheep Hill, where one of the longest railway tunnels of the country ran deep in the bowels of the rock. Somehow we also managed to clear the big abandoned quarry, although we had to carry our skis, to climb over the icy boulders and to watch out for the clefts hidden in the stones’ shadows.
Finally we arrived at a place I had never been before, even though I was a native to the region, and the reason was obvious: there were no ways or paths to reach it. Although I supposed the nearest houses and the whole village actually were only about ten kilometres away, the terrain was extremely difficult, so that the area was well protected from berry pickers, hunters and other accidental hikers. Bog, dense fir thicket, unfriendly rocks, fallen mouldering trees, half collapsed rusty barbed wire fences that a stranger for some strange reason had once set up and then forgotten.
The upper branches of the ancient trees caught the quivering moonlight before it had time to touch the snow-covered ground, and we waded in deep darkness. Nature was really using all possible tricks to make us turn aside from our way. And I would have turned, many, many times, if Rupert’s pale figure hadn’t been skiing in front of me, so single-minded and determined; he knew the way even through the most inaccessible looking thickets. At times he seemed like a mythological spirit who’d been sent to lead me through the Underworld’s hollow hills, and I had to remind myself that he in reality was only the brain damaged former lawyer I knew he was.
We skied down a steep but short hill that brought us out from the forest to the railway. We pushed forward along the moonlit railway bank a couple of kilometres. Then we crossed the rails.
“We have to go through here,” Rupert shouted to me over his shoulder and sped downhill with
muffler flapping, into the forest that continued on the other side of the track, even more forbidding and intractable.
I looked at my watch. 03:21. We’d been skiing a couple of hours.
“The blind track is probably somewhere close by, but it’s impossible to find,” Rupert’s voice continued, more subdued. “But when go through here, we’ll get straight to where the hidden blind track leads.”
I followed the Burberry clad and hatted figure into the dark catacombs of the trees.
The dry and extremely dense fir-thicket made progress very cumbersome. When I looked up I could see no sky at all, I only saw the greyish lattice of dead branches that blocked the moonlight to somewhere above the standing trees. The mummified branches entangled themselves in my woolly coat. They wrenched my muffler loose. They scratched my face and reached at my eyes with their sharp thorns. Over and over again I tore myself off from their grip and received down my neck the falling snow and ice and bits of twigs, and then again I followed, covering my face, the unseen swishing skis and the sound of breaking twigs, until the next obstacle stopped my travel.
I was afraid Rupert wouldn’t bother to wait for me but would disappear and leave me wandering around alone in that shambles of trees and snow. I couldn’t anticipate the functioning of my son’s mind at all. In a way he still was to me my own dear little son (whose logic anyhow had never seemed to me any more understandable than Chinese opera), and at times I still saw him as my successful adult lawyer son who was temporarily resting at my house. But after the skull fracture also a new side had emerged in him, a strange combination of the above two—the anachronistic Rupert, a secretive and often melancholic stranger whose doings and not-doings I was completely unable to predict or control.
We trudged in the rustling jam of dead standing trees at least for two or three hours and for maybe ten kilometres. At least it felt like ten kilometres, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been shorter, perhaps only two hundred meters, or perhaps even far longer.
Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original Page 5
