by Steven Sater
Without much noticing she did, Alice shook her head. And there, on the pool, another Image appeared. Some younger Alice self, in some petticoaty (yes, god-awful) dress. How, Alice thought, how ever could she have worn her hair like that? In those awkward braids? Really, had she ever been that she—and been content? That idiocritical waif? With all her schoolgirl thoughts and dreams like humbug melodies forgotten soon as played. Some self, some song of herself she’d lost—beyond telling, really.
Bite by bite—
Ohhhh you’re getting bigger—
Night by night.
Alice spun about. Who singsonged that?
There, within the pool, staring up at her, were all these countless, curious new Alices. Spectral, older girls. These smug, shut-down versions of her. Mournful future “her”s, mock-mocking her. As if they’d known some future shock she could not yet comprehend. Something in her destined to be lost and found, then maybe lost again.
Just look at them. Mocking, clocking her. Some of them completely growing out of—some, just barely squeezing into—others, like overripe fruits, just completely bursting through her exact blue blouse.
Enough. She winced, tugging her blouse and skirt in her own defense. She turned. But where to turn? Everywhere she turned, some her was there—stalking her. All those spooky future “her”s, so full of themselves and her, glaring back at the mess she’d made of the past.
But there—like some would-be White Knight—her White Rabbit charged, thump-thump-thumping by. Okay! She reached—she waved. “White Rabbit!” she cried. But on he went. Without a pause? Without a look back? She tried again: “White Rabbit!”
“Oh, my dear pink nose!” he fretted (in a White Rabbit–lingo all his own). Utterly preoccupied. “Time! It’s time! It’s past, past time!”
And with a hop, skip, leap, he was gone.
Well. Good as it was to see him run again, she had to ask: Had he come here only to do that? Hadn’t they also come to linger together, to take in their Wonderland garden together—all those palefaced roses?
“White . . . Rabbit?”
Nothing. Silence. Only those water-blue shadows of Her Alice-ness, that ever-present, ever-absent her who haunted her. All those watery other “her”s. Soggy twerps. (Really, it was like she’d been turned into that ancient-myth girl, Echo; everything she heard only fed her regret for something she’d said.)
“Ah, so,” some presuming voice chirped.
“Ho, ho,” came cackling back. From the Pool before her? Some maudlin laugh.
Yes! There, some sunken Mamie-like Image swum, its lank cheeks buried in fast-fading ringlets—like a ruffle of dandelion turning to dust. From those drowned girl eyes, such a baleful look: “Well, if you’d rather thump, thump, thump, don’t mind us.”
Us? Alice scanned the duntawny nowhere around her. No one there.
“Hehehe,” came the titter—from the quicksilver surface of the Pool: “Well, whiskers were always her weakness.”
Alice stiffened; her mirror-image stiffened. “Oh, no. Absolutely no,” she insisted.
“No?” someone purred. Some fresh pretend “her”? Alice scanned the glassy pool. Nothing strange (or, at any rate, nothing new).
She cast about, behind, around, and look: within the emerging branches of some newly emerging tree, glimmered that familiar gibbous grin. Tabatha? But no, surely. Tab could not have teeth as long as those, nor claws, nor dark fur growing all over her. This must be . . . the Cheshire Cat? Yes, just like in her book! With those feral bulging eyes, and the humped darkfurrowed back, and that knowing smile “from ear to ear.” Exactly like that Cat—except that underneath her tummy sat a raft of fat tin cans. But, Alice barely took those in, too caught up in the mystery. Too intrigued by the glimpse into that mystery, seemingly on offer in that grin.
“Cheshire Cat?” she asked.
“Surely, there’s no great wonder in that,” answered the Cat.
“But why would you be by the Pool of Tears? You’re not even in this part of the book.”
“So, am I the one bringing me here?” Chesh challenged, threatening to shut her piano lid of a grin.
“Sorry?” Alice asked. For her furrowing brow had no answer to that. The question was, like with her kitty at home: was she playing with this Cat, or was this Cat playing with her? “Sorry?” Alice asked.
And now, those ever-feral, ever-mesmerizing eyes seemed to drift from the Cat. “You did say you’d bring us.”
“I meant Alfred,” Alice contended. Rather assuming that would put an end to the matter.
“Thanks so much,” snarled the Cat.
Stung, Alice began, “No, of course—”
But before she could blather on, those arched forepaws departed from the Cat. With a hiss: “Aliccccce. You can always indulge in some Magical Study of Happiness. The truth is, a lot’s happened since last you were here. And plenty more to come, before you come back.”
“Do you mean, a lot has happened, or that it’s happened down here?” Alice asked.
“That it’s happened in you, my pet. You can’t be surprised, then,” Chesh reasoned on, “that the wonders look so different.”
“But what am I to do with that?” Alice asked. “What am I to take from all this?”
“Surely,” purred the Cat, letting go of her entire rear, “that too depends on you.”
“But all those ghostly Pretend ‘Me’s?”
“I wouldn’t dismiss them too soon,” Puss came back, her whiskers disbanding into the brisk autumn mist. “Maybe mirrors have memories, too. If so, who knows what all they hold on to.”
Yikes, Alice thought. Feeling frightfully exposed, she looked again: all those Pretend “Her”s—glimmering, grinning so menacingly from the pool. Each of them stinging, assailing her with some “God, is that me?” look, which once she’d cast. See—all the eyebrows she’d squinched! All those faces of “Yeesh.” And, beyond all that: what else had they seen, all those Ghosts of Alice Past?
Grown quite self-conscious now, Alice turned—but saw no Cat. Only some brooding raft of clouds. There, she could discern a sort of ghostbright crescent mouth—like some odd piano full of too many bright keys. But surely, no Cat thereat.
No, she’d been left alone, just she and this intense distorting Mirror. (Its distortions only exacerbating the endless quarrel with herself she was always and forever finding herself in.) Really, must a Pool of Tears be so impertinent? Couldn’t a puddle just lie down and feel sad? Apparently not, in this bruised new Wonderland.
Now, what had she been just about to . . . ? Something, there’d been, which she’d been about to . . . Before whatever new thought had come barging in. What? Ah yes. The question was: What had been going on, down this hole?
So . . . With a restless toss of her sleepless head, she let herself brazenly ask: “The Rabbit. The White Rabbit. Has he met some other girl to give his gloves?”
“Only the mere thousand who come tumbling down each hour,” some mirror-self spat back.
“Double that, on Sundays,” another mouth mocked her.
“Ho ho. Ho ho,” every mock-Alice laughed and laughed. (Every other “ho” concluding in a hiss. As if mere laughter could no longer express her former and future selves’ darker contempt.)
And with a merry round of further “Ho ho”s, all the images dissolved. Leaving Alice with no reflection at all. Alone, now, in Wonderland—and with the weird sense that she’d always somehow been expecting this.
CHAPTER XII:
—
AND ALL THE BLUE CLOUDS SING
“WHOOOOOO are yoooouuu?”
Those words, so long unheard, yet so familiar. That voice of utter languor seeming to drift right through her.
Alice knew, knew and loved (loved perhaps not wisely but so well) this exact page of her storybook. And here she stood, as never before s
he’d stood, somehow within it! She, the same old she, but leaning against that proverbial Buttercup, surrounded by all those near-transparent blades of summer grass and all the most exuberant flowers. (Which heretofore she’d read of, but only could imagine.) And now here they were, just here: all those Tiger Lilies, Larkspur, Dahlias, and Violets, spurting up, flush beside and flushed behind her, like a throng of semi-friendly fellow concertgoers. Maintaining a semi-dignified silence. And there, like some grand dusty proscenium awaiting its main attraction: a large-large mushroom rising, like a maestro, swaying in place, and almost the very same height as she (whatever height this new she might be).
Once she had looked beneath that mushroom, once (as in their book) she’d looked round “both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on top of it.”
Savoring this louche, fantastical moment, one of her favorites of all the storybook bits, Alice took her time, turning longingly round, only to see . . . not her dear, expected Caterpillar. (Namely, Alfred’s spot-on imitation of their book’s illustration.) But rather, some sort of sultry, lounge-about, slightly older boy, the type whom Mum would tell her to ignore. A boy who rather looked like that would-be pilot, the ponderously-toking, pipe-wielding Angus. Wait—she couldn’t have brought Angus here, too. What did he care about some silly Tale? He couldn’t even be bothered to listen.
But whatever she’d done or not done, there he was. That languid Caterpillar face, just like Angus’s face, a blur of thought and smoke. His legs—well, unlike Angus’s legs, a corps of countless itsy feet—folded wryly beneath his larva-ly torso and the last few rungs of (weirdly, wartime) belly.
Curiouser and curiouser, Alice thought. And she looked again at that shroom, which seemed now an open parachute, its plume billowing high into the cloudless afternoon.
Upon the most elaborately winding hookah—like on Angus’s ivory pipe—that rakishly handsome scapegrace puffed. He pondered. Without a look at Alice, staring her down: “I said: whooooo are youuu? Remind me.”
“Well, once upon a time I knew,” Alice responded with some misgiving that she even was responding. “But I’ve changed so many times today.”
“Do you mean,” he crooned, “you’ve changed your mind?”
“And body, too.”
“Oh, don’t I know,” the Caterpillar intoned. And now those larval eyes seemed to bore right through her, with a wild surmise: “So, who arrrre you?”
“I’m afraid I’m new to me,” she ventured.
“Well, you’re looking new to me—”
“No matter really who you are to you,” some second voice said. Even as a second Caterpillar head appeared. Purling, puffing up slyly; seemingly young-womanly, and more than a little bosomly:
Now, whooooo? Some other Caterpillar? A female Caterpillar? Or a second, unfamiliar head on her fond old familiar? Such come-hither, Smoky-Lash mascaraed eyes, such a strangely dainty mouth, beckoning to Alice through some cloudy-blue perfume.
Joggled, Alice could only question: “But . . . who are you?”
“Come, look!” soughed that fulsome Number 2.
Alice looked again: “But are you part of him?”
“Or, is he part of you?” asked the buxom 2.
“Now, how could that be?” asked Alice, finding herself oddly drawn to this brave new nubile beast. And yet, also a bit dumbfounded.
All nonchalant, that curvy Caterpillar Number 2 came winding many a wreath alluringly. Issuing, from her sultry tongue, such a satin sound: “Whose head’s in the book? Not his.”
“Not hers,” wooed Number 1.
Now that brawny Number 1 came winding, virilely unwinding, round. Terribly cool and friendly.
Alice stiffened, looked again. “Now I’m confused.”
She paused, or tried to pause. She looked again. And there, Caterpillar 2 came lolling, like some luxuriant lingerie, wrapping round Alice’s unsteady shoulder: “You you you must put put down that book.”
“What book?” Alice feinted.
“The one in your head, that is.”
“Put put it down,” drawled that handsomely lumbering Number 1. “Do.”
With a side-curved head, Alice brooded on this odd, alluring Number 1. This rogue, who seemed to tell her, with that languorous grin of his, he knew exactly how it felt to be within her. Within that . . . newly forming her. That newly curvier, there-before-her her. But but but, she wondered, could it actually give her pleasure, growing bigger?
“You,” she murmured, nervously turning to Number 2, “you’re not even in the book. Not as I remember—from the pictures.”
“A girl can’t change the pictures?” Number 2 appended, drawing nearer.
Now Number 1, too, wooed nearer: “Set it down a minute—all the Alice-ness . . .”
“All that By-the-bookness . . .” blued Number 2.
To the uttermost tip of her outermost lip, Caterpillar Number 1 extended the blueing hookah nib. And like that devilish Serpent, offered: “One puff . . . ?”
One . . . what?
Nearer and nearer coiled Number 2, her sultry, mandibled mouth towering above all her mazy folds: “Stops time, it does.”
An electric charge ran through Alice—as if those words had flipped some inner switch. “Stops time?” she asked. “It does?”
“To whom Time may concern, it does.”
So . . . there it was! The answer to the riddle of why here she was—of course it was! To stop time. To learn the way, the winding way, to make it stop. “But, does it work on . . . other creatures, too?”
“Let’s start with you,” Number 2 importuned. With a trailing sigh, which seemed to fathom Alice’s everything. All those smokeblue feelings rising, seeming to rise, from that Caterpillar’s delectable little feet, through every foxy twinge of her lower extremity up to that welcoming breast.
So close those Caterpillars wound around Alice now: another and another mouth, another softsoft breast, another manly chest; wherever she turned, another O-O-O-ing cloud . . .
Roused by the rising swell of those fumes, she spoke more freely: “I have a friend, you know, my dearest friend, spends so much time pursuing time, consumed by running out of time . . .”
“Always thinking forward and remembering backward?” offered Number 1.
“Chasing before,” proffered Number 2, “and chasing after?”
Nearer still wound Number 1, beguiling even his fumes, which wafted forth, then back, to his fullmanly lips: “One puff.”
“But my head?” she asked. “Will I ever get it back?”
“Then, do you want it back?” some new tongue purred.
Whoooo said that? Alice cast about, and there, in a neighboring (till recently, nonexistent) tree hovered that conspiratorial Cheshire Puss.
“My head?” Alice asked.
“Yesss,” purred Puss, “it took so long to lose it, as it is.”
“And yet, I’m so very accustomed to . . . having it.”
“High time, then,” Puss averred, “you find out how to do without it.”
“But, how do I do that?”
“Lose yourself with it,” returned that Cat. “The way, some say, a lover disappears into a kiss . . .”
“Well, when you put it that way.”
With a measured step, half-convinced, Alice turned back—and there, invitingly enough, rose that shapely Caterpillar 2: “Come,” said she, “shall we . . . disappear?”
“Ohhh,” Alice ohhh’d, “but it’s taken me so long just to appear. I’m not sure I’m ready yet to disappear.”
A subtle and mighty O, ascending, floated, fit right around her sniffly nose. She couldn’t let that in. Or could she? . . .
Never, never once in her life, had she considered what it would be like to set aside all the talk in her mind, all the expectation that b
red all the regret. Could it be useful, actually, just to relax? (And if so, what would that mean for him? To set aside the eating cares? To feel more of a peace with himself than with his fear?)
“One puff,” proposed Number 1, “and all one golden afternoon.”
For him, too? The thing was, those cool-kid Caterpillars sure seemed sure of themselves. “But will it really?”
“You tell us,” puled lovely Number 2.
And with that “us,” Alice leaned—as if recollecting some dream in which she’d leaned—inclining herself toward some fruit of wisdom so delicious, Time itself would stop; and in that pause, she’d let her head drift off. Yes. She’d let all of it drift, all the niggling thought, the ceaseless self-questioning, all the continual consciousness . . .
With that, she . . . puffed. Oh whoa! Her head—the head she’d always held so dear—went lifting, hovering, surging—
“Kachhhhhhhhhhhhhhm.”
Kachhhhhhhhhhhhhhm? And now some plank in Alice’s reasoning broke. Just when she’d been finding such sure footing (in her mind), suddenly she found herself falling, falling through some realm of blue—thudding up against and plunging back into some too-too-grounded world.
“Mmm-hmm?” she mm’d.
“Kachhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhm,” a raucous throat, declamatorily cleared. A knownknown voice, following up: “My gloves?”
A familiar-seeming figure, Alice seemed to see. Someone looking quite perturbed. White Rabbit? Oh no. Quick! Snap to!
“I believe you have my gloves?” he asked again. Barely containing his consternation.
“Whooooo, me?” asked she.
“You don’t?”
“I do. I must.”
