by Steven Sater
“ALICE SPENCER!”
This time, her full name. Which, of course, took that much longer. Which, of course, gave Alice such a tremor, till she felt herself frozen—in those two extra syllables of fear. Caught, with that snatch of sheet in her red hand. Nothing left to lose, then, was there? Better just to yank open that curtain—to be with him, a moment. All at once, she tugged the sheet . . .
And there he was. In one keen glance she could grasp it: his cheeks, his throat, so red and swollen; his eyes sunken in hollows; his forehead matted with sweat—as if he’d been feeding only on the fever now. Poor Alfred! The Doctor bent over him; some press-down stick, some beastly twig in that hypocritically Hippocratic hand, pressing down, down, down—as if he’d leverage Alfred from his tongue. Over him, that Doctor darkly murmured some pseudo-truth, some mumbo jumbo: “Due to Hypovolemia, and concomitant Hyperhydrosis—severe night sweats . . .”
Alfred trembled as her eyes passed over his. Over his lips, his strained neck, throbbing. Breathing. Oh, touch me, sad eyes. Soft eyes. See me, Alfred.
Through the fringe of dark fluttering lashes, he saw her—he must have! He tried to utter something—“Alice”?—but his bloodshot blue eyes washed full of tears, then fluttered shut again. As if someone had just closed the blinds on her view of the sea . . .
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, still here. I’m here.”
And with that, a stab of rage came ripping through the curtain. Stout rutted hands grabbing, thrashing her. Gripping and suffocating her. “Let me go!” Alice shrieked. “He needs me.” But, those barbed-wire arms clenched tighter, piercing their cold thorns into Alice’s flesh, as that Monster Nurse lugged the girl like a sack of guts toward her cot.
“Please!” Alice protested. “You’re hurting me.”
“No. You are hurting you. I am merely moving through.”
So, is this what Nurses do? Keep everyone apart, for fear their mental flu will spread? As if words and thoughts and looks were somehow germs?
“And button up that blousy, Mousey,” the Red Cross Nurse groused.
Ouch! If only she were in Wonderland now, Alice thought, she could fall—flat on her fat Alice-face—like one of those shamefaced Playing Cards, humiliated by the Queen of Hearts. Not being there, but here, within this grimy Tube station, she merely lowered her eyes and took in her guilty blouse again. Yes sure, it bulged—a bit. But it had unbuttoned itself, it had!
“Button it,” that dour Nurse pronounced. Then, with a brusque peremptory shove, she dumped Alice onto her deadly cot.
“Back! To! Your! Bed!”
CHAPTER II:
—
SO MANY GUTTERING CANDLES
NIGHT Nine, was it already, she’d been here? That she’d bunched herself up and tossed herself about and just generally lain here? Tossing and tossling not only her head, but also her (adjacent) shoulders and neck. Trying to scrunch herself into some spot, in this god-awful cot, that felt like sleep.
Nine nights, yes. All of them crowding together, as only nights can. All of those nights settling in beside her, like ghosts cuddling in, on the cold platform with her, breathing this thick-with-breath air. All of those ghost nights, restless, sleepless, fidgeting, as she was, beneath the drip, the relentless drip.
Sleep, Alice, sleep—it will all seem truer, if stranger, after a sleep. Or so she told herself, this less-familiar self, while she struggled to yawn out her arms without battering into some neighboring cot. Failing at that, she gathered them back, ignoring the still-tender burn spots along her forearms and chest, doing her best still to resist the itch of her raw, scraped knees. Better, she knew, not to breathe a word about them (the last thing she needed was someone doctoring her). And what good was Mercurochrome, anyway? Better to try not to fret. Better just to lie here in silence, dodging all these thoughts (these thoughts like wasps in mid-August, issuing in endless hissing swarms, stinging, assailing her, louder and louder, the more she kept trying to swat them away). Better to breathe, to lie still and keep trying, trying, pretending to sleep (what they call sleep) (they who were truly asleep). When all she wanted, really, was to escape from this shadowy Underworld, from this imbecile Tube-station hell, to lie in her warm room again—her room, as it once had been—before the wailing cries of drones, before the fearful humming from her anxious windowpanes—to lie, warm as warm, in her old familiar sheets again, and read.
Good God, just to forget herself and read!
But where were they—her bed, her soft Witney blanket, her so-long-slept-on, rose-embroidered sheets? All the lovely bed-lamp world she’d known? The “me” she’d been? Forever smelling of lemon and lavender soap. The me she’d simply taken for granted she would always be. Forever immersed in her book or out on the lawn, enacting whole chapters with Alfred—departing to Wonderland with him; chattering with the Magpie; grousing with the Gryphon; bantering with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare while sipping their own mad, imaginary tea. But now—where was all that now? Their homes, their common garden? Her mother, sister—Papa, too, of course. Poor Papa!—where were they?
Gone. All gone. As if, in some few months, the world had grown so old in death. So old in bombs. In dark-bright fires screaming from the sky, cracking the heavens across, leaving them gaping, night after night—Death in his black leather jacket, shaking London from her streets. And with his feckless gloved hand, ripping, clawing the heart out of Bromley; battering out every window, each shopfront, mowing down flats, making a smoky O of her broad, gabled school.
And it wasn’t just Bromley, of course. Out there, right now, Alice knew, beyond this trembling Underground, the entire city, her proud lovely city, had been brought in rubble to its knees. Strong, unstoppable, eternal London—so many people unbowed, and yet so many undone, now bending, weeping. Can’t someone cry stop? How can this be?
And yet, for all that had been lost, all was not lost. And never would be lost. So much still there. It must be still. Her loved London Bridge. Still standing. Thankfully. Luminous a moment, from the passing beams of searchlights; then, soon obscured again. A phantom bridge, but no less solid; as it lifted the night, unglimpsed, within its arms. And there, there must be still, some score of gas-masked toddlers skipping rope on heaps of earth, on someone’s bedroom turned to rubbled street. There, a sorry, gazeless girl with her blinking-eyed doll, both of them staring at nothing, merely perched on a pile of debris; the Thames still flowing, running softly, on. There, a radiant young bride walking through broken streets, with her glorious satin train in her daintier hand.
And . . . there, from that above-earth, another siren. Up there, no doubt, with the sound, every dog would run bounding home, as those Messerschmitts went screaming, went crying, dropping their shells from some surreal rosy sky. The crowds—you could almost hear them, scattering—running, taking cover under the Blackfriars Bridge—so many! Huddling beneath the broken altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Watching as their lives, their homes, their loved ones all went up in flames.
And here? Down here? In this cavernous, clammy old tunnel? In this querulous cell, with its dirtywhite walls. (Where some lost soul seemed embalmed in every last tile.) Only those endless, cylindrical walls—if walls they could be called—looming round and above, speechless and cold. Below, just there, up and down those implacable stairs, only the bundled-up sleepers: fellow pilgrims in this make-do shelter, sojourners of the night, who could find no room on the congested platform. Stair-dwelling semi-regulars they were; smelling of infection and disinfectant (which, admittedly, she did, too) and camphor and urine; breathing themselves, the smells of all the London dead, while resting their heads (and the occasional attaché case) on those same stairs. And, below them? A space hardly larger, if longer, than her room (her old, lost room, where she’d been free to read, and think, and just generally be as miserable as she pleased). But here: only this flat concrete platform, strung with unsleeping cots—a landscape o
f open eyes, looking out on those colder steel tracks.
How, she wondered, how had she ever managed to find herself here? To settle Alfred here—in this ward of ailing and wounded youth. After all those fiery nights. A conflagration of September nights, like a blank in nature and time. Nights when she’d run like a stray dog, skulking about the streets, hiding with Alfred. Ducking the bombs, jumping gutters, until he had stumbled—had fallen—Stop! Alfred!—caught in an avalanche of brick. In a whirlwind of gravel and mortar. No fireman near, no tin-helmeted warden to help him, scarcely conscious, to his feet, to lead him through those blighted streets. No. On, alone, she’d led him. Through heaps of ruin, toward an ashen queue—no end to it, the children, with dust-covered suitcases, the women and men, laden with bags and blankets, like some wandering tribe in captivity, desperate to find shelter in this Tube station. No one willing to risk their spot in line to help them down—him, wounded and limping—down those cramped, crowded stairs. Not one sleeper rising, not one waking to aid them. Too accustomed they all were, by now, to cries through the night. To wounded bodies scuffling by. Like so many contorted limbs of trees and scattered leaves, those abject sleepers lay bestrewn on those stairs, both guarding and blocking the way to this Underworld realm. To this below-world, this makeshift shelter, where so many had settled, where they still huddled: evacuees, as she was, of their city at siege. Their hearts resigned to a state of sempiternal sleep. Like so many guttering, indignant candles, refusing to give up their flames.
So, too, Alfred and she now huddled. Fellow squatters on the common concrete. Yes.
With some touch of envy perhaps, Alice looked again at all those separate sleepers, finding themselves within the one sleep. That must be peace. For, here she was, whoever now she was—asleep but not asleep. In this hole that was her sleepless mind. Down this hole, upon a platform, which, unlike those somnolent stairs, was filled with only the most rowdy, waking crowd: all these strange sad displaced children, to say nothing of that hopeless, opium-smoking older lad, and those soldiers—that one soldier, wounded, with artillery fragments littered through him. And there, her dearest dear, her injured friend, her Alfred. Roped off, curtained apart, alone with the alone.
So unfair. Disgraceful, really. There, they kept him, so rigidly kept him, so far from her—bandaged and iodined, laid out on a sort of stretcher, continually inspected and tended, behind those makeshift hospital curtains. And she, consigned to this dismal, distant cot. Compelled to lie, no longer beside him. To see and know him there, so many—five? six?—cots away, and in quarantine! To what end? For how long? Her Alfred!
Here. Upon the chill, damp platform of some shadow-riddled station, her sole friend, her loved friend, coughing up blood and moaning, ailing. Alfred! Here, where once they’d ridden the train to school.
CHAPTER III:
—
ANOTHER ACTUAL ALICE
“OH dear! Oh dear! I’m late!” he’d so grandiloquently exclaimed. The five-year-old Alfred, yanking his moonfaced watch from his plaid-ish pocket. Running past, then dashing back, then past and back again, until Alice had nearly gone racing after him . . .
Oh dear, thought Alice again now, crowded into this Tube-station realm, all these years after, remembering . . . Invoking for herself again those well-worn words of her treasured Adventures in Wonderland book: “Curiouser and curiouser!” Sometimes it struck her (though, still, she’d deny it to Mum), just how much of herself she had given, and still would so willingly give, to that book. Their book. All those pages, those luminous sentences, reread so often, they’d grown clearer than her own thoughts . . . Sometimes indeed, it seemed, those Wonderland words were the whole of her world, the sole place she found her truly strange self. She, who so often was two—both the doer and the looker-on—could become, there, so solidly one.
Alone on her usual bench, beneath that gnarled black mulberry, full of the near-illicit joy and fear prompted by all those storied scenes, she’d pore over page after page (in the classic crimson volume Alfred had given her), retrieving all the reveries she’d known there, remembering, too, all the accidental sights and smells, the tics of life surrounding her on all those gorgeous stolen afternoons. That is, until some Banal Disrupter would come crying, exasperatingly enough: “Dinner!” or “Come, Alice—tennis!” Dragging her back to that dreary land, that actual lawn, in the actual, colossal, stifling sun, that primitive country of Philistine family and cavemen friends, who dwelled outside her mind—and so, outside her book.
And of course it was also that book that had served, from their earliest childhood, as her chief recreation, her source of the purest joy with Alfred. Indeed, it was Alfred who’d first told her of Wonderland, beneath that ageless white afternoon sky, in the common garden that united their houses (that broad, tree-lined, and rarely mown lawn, which bound all the homes of their street with the lane of houses just behind). There it was she’d first seen him, beneath the pale May blossoms of a wild cherry tree. Him, already so him. Already playing the White Rabbit, both chasing after and bolting from his own shadow. Scattering pigeons from the neighboring brick path, rattling on, to the calm indifferent daisies and the still-green daffodils, as he thumped and skipped and jumped, his head half-flung back—in the likeness of a bounding hare!
“Dear dear! So much ado! Adieu, adieu! I’m late, so late, so late!”
“For what?” she’d naively called after. Never having heard of such an anxious, articulate (and perhaps bilingual) Rabbit.
“The Queen, the Queen!” he’d blazoned back. “She’ll have my head! She will, you know? I must be there, beside her royal side, to play her Herald at the Trial!”
And off he’d dashed again. Past that mossy toolshed, that leaf-strewn rookery fountain, which he seemed to tag, in passing, with some giddy sense of Wonderland . . .
How lost she’d stood—and puzzled. And yet, rapt in wonder. All the more so, as the boy remained so unselfconscious, carrying on with utter aplomb. As if it were thoroughly ordinary to be thumping about, wriggling pretend-paws like mad castanets, practically yanking pretend-whiskers out, in the guise of a character from a storybook. How warmly, how simply he’d invited her in—to join that Rabbit-him in Wonderland. And then, his unutterable joy! His disbelieving sense of all it meant to be him, now that he’d welcomed an actual Alice in!
“Why, it’s positively everything,” he proclaimed, panting for breath. The spring air surrounding, seeming so enamored with him.
How soon thereafter—that same day, was it? or one later?—he’d allowed her the secretest peek at his most treasured treasure. His paperbound, pocket edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Just imagine, Alice,” he’d announced, his face so proud, “the book was written for another actual Alice. Alice Liddell. Actually.”
“Another actual Alice?” she’d teased.
“Absolutely. My Dad told me. It’s all from stories this mad maths professor told her—over the course of one summer afternoon, as he rowed her and her sisters down the Oxford river . . .”
How he’d grinned! As if he’d just become part of the book’s royal lineage, because he, too, was letting an actual Alice in.
How long they marveled over each illustration. How eagerly he read out his most favorite passages, adopting a wild antic voice and the most definitive gesture for each of those most particular characters. (Boldly displaying, in the meantime, the full, virtuosic range of his vocal register.) Until it seemed the book had been written for his voice (much as music may be written for a particular singer). Thus was the book granted its deepest wish only in being read aloud by him.
“The Caterpillar,” Alfred instructed, “being the Caterpillar, was, is, and always will be first to speak.”
“I see.”
“Indeed.”
And so, adopting the Caterpillar’s dreamsmoky catch in the throat, he addressed her as the Storybook Her: “Just what s
ize, Alice, do you truly wish to be?”
“Oh,” she hastily replied (doing her best to follow the script), “I’m not particular as to which size.”
“Or not particularly?” he extemporized dryly.
“It’s just that one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”
“I don’t know,” that Caterpillar-Alfred concluded, most conclusively.
Naturally. Given how “sacred” the text, and how much care he’d already invested in performing so punctiliously each of its characters, it took some few days for Alice’s full initiation. And yet, from that very first day, she was entrusted with the sublime, with the role of a lifetime. She was starring as Alice! (While coached on her lines, she was also encouraged to improvise—but only so long as she remained, as he did, within each scene’s arc and classic story line.) In the meanwhile, he explained delightedly, he’d be playing every other role. The King and Queen of Hearts, the Dodo, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the Mock Turtle. And, while she balked initially, before the end of that lazy blue day, she couldn’t imagine anyone, ever, doing them better.
For Alfred so completely disappeared into each tic, into each transmuting timber of each distinctive character, it was less like watching a display of his dramatic artistry and more like looking through some series of Wonderland windows into his unchanging soul.
And so it began. A summer of afternoons. And two summers thereafter. The intervening autumns and winters, too; all day, every day, always late afternoon. The two of them, in those frostier seasons, perched in his sitting room. Reading aloud, leaping up, acting out all those scenes, reveling in all those harlequin characters. Falling down, down the hole, together, to such mad adventures.
So it began; so it went. So they lived—summer to summer, battening themselves for the pageant of winter. Their shadows aglow on the wall by his fireside, like coconspirators, racing as they raced their Caucus Race, dancing as they danced their Lobster Dance. She, forever chasing and chasing her brilliant White Rabbit, without ever truly admitting (to herself or him) how much she longed to hold on.
