Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  But those Rabbit eyes seared through her. “Me, I’ve been waiting for our scene.”

  Our . . . what? She tried to recall. She did try.

  “Come, come,” he snipped, “you know the bit. ‘The Crash of Broken Glass’—the big ‘Alas.’”

  No no no no clue. She had no clue.

  “Our bit, I say,” said he. “The page you skipped?”

  “I did?” she gulped. Not doubting him. But what?

  He Rabbited in, insistent. “When your hand is just so big you knock down my entire house. And I call you Mary Ann . . . ?”

  Ah yesssssssssss. That bit. In truth, she was never unhappy to skip that dippy scene, where he called her “Mary Ann.” But braving it, her smile said, “Haha, yes. And you send me off to fetch your gloves and fan!”

  “I’m frantic for them, actually.”

  “Of course. So sorry. Sorry. I suppose I . . .”

  “Got distracted?” cooed that canny Caterpillar 2, winding her budding way, redundant, toward Alice—ring after marvelous ring of that bluer blue.

  Now, see. In all the rush and wooziness, Alice had forgotten that caddish, and that smoldering, new companion.

  Alarmed, alert, her Rabbit jerked and twitched, his vellicative paw brushing her hand: “So, shall we?”

  He drew himself up. Like some neurasthenic thespian. Whiskers crimpling, as he (all derring-do) leapt into the scene they’d missed: “‘Oh, Mary Ann! Mary Ann! Fetch me my gloves, this instant.’”

  Still woozy, Alice barely could handle it. “But is that really why you’ve come? To fetch your gloves?”

  “And fan?” vamped Caterpillar Number 1.

  And now those two (1 & 2) wound their countless legs together, taunting: “As if you meant no more to him than random Mary Ann.”

  “Oh, Mary Ann . . . ?” cooed Number 2.

  And Number 1: “Back a bit, where we began . . .”

  White Rabbit twitched, his stoical ears in a total snit: “Where what began?” His whiskers, paws, tail, and nose aquiver. “Time, time, I have so little time. Oh, why did I come down at all?”

  “Perhaps I’m looking through a different glass,” Alice postulated. (Trying, she was trying. Gold Star for that.)

  He fidgettwitched—so anxiously, so antsily—as if he kept using each fidget to dig, then to deepen, some river between them.

  “Come,” she goaded him. “You followed me, now follow me.”

  “No,” he retorted, “follow me.”

  Waistcoat collar tight hot itching, Rabbit hopped into his umpteenth recitation of that celebrated book bit. “‘Oh, Mary Ann! Run home for me, this moment, please.’”

  Alice stood, just stood and stared. “Come, aren’t we a bit too big for this?”

  His look darkened. But now, through fumy rooms of blue, she reached; she took that hookah, and she held it out to him—knowing the more she unsettled the bunny, the more she’d be tempting the boy. “But, this . . . stops time, it does.”

  “It does?”

  “To whom Time may concern, it does,” she confirmed.

  Poor Alfred-Bunny. In a puddle-muddle, so perplexed. Wavering so uncertainly. Waffling—wobbling—oscillating, really—he stifled a thump and met her look.

  Tenderly, Alice offered: “Just—one puff? You’ll know no time. You’ll breathe again.”

  He did not budge. But Alice sensed, she knew, he wanted it. More nearly toward him she leaned, as he teeter-tottered. Toward her he leaned, then away, then to-to-toward . . .

  All at once, his nose bunched up, in spasm: “But it’s not us who puff.” Tilting his head toward Caterpillars 2 and 1, he offered as proof: “They’re them. We’re us. We can’t be . . . other Characters.”

  “Can’t try on other selves, you mean?”

  “Be other than ourselves?”

  At that she smiled; but answer made she none. At a loss, White Rabbit watched; every nerve within him tingling, as she puffed . . . as she . . . peaked. As she exhaled one lustrous cloud—tempting, tickling him with something so exultant; meanwhile, near-burning his bunny olfactories.

  Against his flinching underlip, she rubbed that hookah, as if it were some wish-fulfilling lamp: “Drink me.”

  “What?!”

  She couldn’t not grin, assuring him. “Come. That is the scene.”

  The Honorable Mr. W. Rabbit seemed to feel himself go numb—meeting her look, sending a quick chill thrilling through Alice, a sense of nascent exaltation. Till it felt like they both might rise right off the ground . . . Then, suddenly, he (or his overwrought, rioting mind) cried stop: “Oh, my dear, dear fur and whiskers! The Queen! The Queen! She’ll have my head—you understand?”

  Skeptically, Alice eyed him: “She will?”

  “She will. As sure as ferrets are ferrets. Executed.”

  Feigning bland indifference, Alice let him simmer. “Then go.”

  “I will,” his eyes, his words, his petrified fur affirmed.

  But he did not move. He could not. Straight-faced, Alice asked: “And so?”

  Poor Rabbit trembled. Hemming-hawing. “I am rather fearful of losing my head.”

  “I know,” said she.

  “I’ll go,” said he.

  Almost, he did. Almosting it. Half a pace he took, with half a rising wish . . . But, a brawling voice abruptly butted in and punctured every bit of Wonderland: “Absolutely, you will go. In fact, the Orderlies are here. First stretchers go to the soldiers, then it’s you.”

  Alice stopped her recitation cold. And stood, speechless as those old cylindrical walls, which rose into view again, like some ghastly caricature of Dover’s cliffs. Blankly she stared about: no wonder, no Wonderland, anywhere. No sungorgeous clouds, only Angus Wilkins’s opium. No luxuriantly lounging Caterpillars. No watery future “Her”s (certainly not in concrete-dusted skirts like hers)—just her. No White Rabbit. But—Alfred?!

  Ah, there he was, behind that starched, stranded curtain. All else a wash: nothing but the one unending Underground. Nothing but the wilderness of cots. As if, or so the burlap insisted, life should be merely physical, now they were here. (But of course it wasn’t. Surely, their real life took place in their minds. That was where “events,” good or bad, landed. Where they mattered, really. Where everything lived on—in memory—in all she imagined . . .)

  In the meanwhile, that Platform-World rolled on. Irrefutable. Belligerent. The monstrous Red Cross Nurse pivoted; and sweeping that quarantine’s curtain closed, she addressed the waiting stretchers. (Those stretchers being sent somewhere else—to gather someone else.) “Now move it!”

  Clap clap she clapped her ruddy hands. Each clap, like her clamorous tongue, resounding through the entire Tube station. Her starched-white armor glimmering in the aura she wore, the halo-glow she had absorbed from the chokes, gasps, screams of all those sadly expiring souls she’d cared for, seemingly without a care for them.

  Listen to me, Alice thought, attacking some old Nurse. Surely, my wit’s diseased. But she so was at a loss for how to resist her thought—for how best to help her friend. Caught up in her own obstinate questionings, she’d let her story slip. And she had no word, no refrain she could catch, no refrain that would bring it wordlessly back. For she only truly had it, having him—telling, retelling it, to and with him.

  Maybe, she concluded, the White Rabbit had been right to be so wary; maybe she’d lost her grip on the tale by changing it? She searched her heart—from blank to blank, without a thread; without a narrative to stitch one supposition to the next; her every other thought a page she’d skipped. Or perhaps like a page she’d read (as she so often did) without paying any attention to it.

  Thankfully, Tabatha had been paying keen attention, intent on everything untold in Alice’s tale. She prodded: “So, did he? Lose his head?”

  “Did . . . what?” asked A
lice, at a loss herself.

  “Your Rabbit.”

  “They can’t take him,” Alice stated, definitive. “I won’t let them.”

  The Red Cross Nurse turned—one Red Cross look. “He will go, when and where we send him. Wherever we send him. Now, do I have to strap you to that bed?”

  To a child like me, thought Alice, every grown-up is a giant. But this Nurse rose so high as just to be colossal.

  Clap clap, those Goliath hands clapped: “Lights out, in ten minutes.”

  On the woman went. Whew. Alice peered, through the half-extinguished light, toward that closed curtain. Closed indeed—like a page she no longer could read, by dint of staring so long at it. Yet—what could she do but look? All the while feeling, acutely, how each look brought home only the distance between them. (When, in fact, one shared glance might hold so much—so much food for further thought, so much tenderness . . .) Really, it was like that Nurse had closed a door, just so she could close every possible window.

  * * *

  • • •

  . . . Only some months ago—six, maybe seven months—was it? Though it all seemed so remote as to belong to someone else’s life. (Some world, some life, before the nightly hail of the bright bombs began.)

  That stolen Sunday afternoon with Alfred. He, only just “well enough” to go out again. She, only just approved to accompany him.

  The Giraffe House, Regent’s Park. In the gelid light of some enduring, if crueler, April day. Together they’d stood, in a wondering silence, as once they’d stood so many years before. He, extending a leaner forefinger toward their favorite giraffe. (Still there!) “See, Alice? His tongue—dark as ever.”

  “And not a bit sunburnt,” she’d kidded, echoing her exact words from all those years before.

  He nodded, grown quiet with remembering. But his smile half a frown already.

  “We’ll be careful to keep our mouths shut,” she gibbered. Wanting to luxuriate within their shared remembering but sensing some more solemn spell come over him.

  He nodded toward their long-necked friend. “Casts a longer shadow, these days, doesn’t he?”

  Meaning? she near-challenged him. But some stronger instinct told her just to let be, just to listen.

  And he continued: “He’s like all those things most near to us—sadly, all too dear to us. All the stuff of circumstance, in the midst of which we eat and drink and live—things like my illness, say; or, which train shall we take to get ‘poor Alfred’ home again?—all that seems to loom so large, its shadow takes up all the room in us. Till everything that matters most becomes so small. So nebulous. Nothing but an after-dinner dream . . .”

  Oh, but it does not, Alfred. It will not.

  * * *

  • • •

  This, though, this surely was no dream. This Underground . . . diminishment. This sitting, here, broad-waking—on some unsleeping cot. Her whole psyche so emaciated, she felt like one of those Giacometti sculptures, really. Her body like a terror to her. Her arms, her legs, without dimension. And he, the wiriest wraith, mere silhouette of all he’d been, exhibited upon some quarantine bed. And . . . everywhere else she would look, nothing seemed quite to include or surround either of them.

  Vigilantly she listened. No coughs now, no wheezes. “So did he?” came some odd meow, drifting down and down.

  “Whoooooooooooo?” inquired Angus, just as abruptly. A poof of azure smoke hovering, wafting through.

  And now, a spray of fresh, familiar, and still disconcerting voices:

  “Oh, you know who. We all know who.”

  “Him, that’s who.”

  “You-hoo!”

  Mamie, Dodgy—it must be. Alice knew, without even looking. The two of them, in their persnickety two-of-them-ness, always insulting. Chittering, chattering, always interrupting. What she wouldn’t give to distill all that unintelligible talk to a single intelligent thought.

  Still. Once more, Alice peered about: the world still there, without her all the time. That painfully ordinary platform, that customary Cot-Land, where not a dot, not a jot had shifted. Still, as always: the soldiers wailing; the hepped-up Harold leaping, ducking about; Dodgy doing dress-ups (wound in his woolen, but as in some profusion of silk and shawl); and of course that nimble-marmoset Mamie, she, who’d tossed a tarot deck with Lady Asquith, blandly disdaining to play Whist (let alone, Go Fish) with the likes of Nigel; he, who—to her annoyance—kept blunting, nubbing, and ink-smudging his cards’ ends, rub-a-dub-dubbing them from neck to chin, murmuring under his breath, “This is it, it’s the end. It goes dark in the end!”; as Angus sat, wielding his manly, ash- speckled deck, pondering the nothing—except, perhaps, the life he might have had, the life that might have made life worth all this.

  And yet. Something had changed. But what, if nothing had changed?

  Alice sat, so unusually self-possessed, so consumed with her own searching thoughts, it was as if she were alone with them: her only task, to sift through them. Yet, even as she did, there came the most querulous, cicada-like sounds, issuing from all those chirruping, largely indistinguishable mouths:

  “So, did he?”

  Some feigning mouth deigned to comment, as if with disinterest: “Lost his furry head, did he—for the sake of that one puff?”

  “See, see, here here!” Harold Pudding exulted, riffling through his sketchpad pages. “His funny bunny ears, right here—puffpuffing up with every puff!”

  What a soldier you must have been, Harold.

  “She kissed him?” inquired Miss Van Eysen.

  “Do tell,” Dodgy cooed. Condescending to profess interest in someone other than himself: “Did he . . . puff?”

  Alice nodded, half-against herself. “He did. And as he did, he . . . rose, floating from the stubble-ground with her, through that full-bare distance, up and on, through the kelly-green veil of the trees.”

  “Sounds like a brilliant high,” observed Tabatha dryly.

  “Me,” that would-be pilot Angus spewed, over the terra-cotta bowl of his otherwise ivory pipe. Pontificating throatily upon his favorite theme: “Me, I think that Caterpillar had a lot to give. Sure, they kept him there, wastin’ away, arse-over-tit, on some shroom. Never lettin’ the would-be pilot rise. Never allowin’ him his wings—am I right? Still, he’ll show ’em, one day—won’t he? When the boy becomes a butterfly!”

  “A sordid business, really,” muttered Dodgy. “Such a beastly story.”

  They’d been listening?

  A sudden rustling, from behind that curtain: “Beastly? No, no. It was . . . lovely.”

  The boy peered out, frail but sitting upright.

  “Alfred?!”

  His look brightened. “Do go on.”

  Trying to adjust her whole sense of herself to accommodate all she felt, seeing him upright again, Alice smiled. “Yes, lovely. Yes.”

  And with that, the tale resumed. And it took up every bit of the room within her head.

  CHAPTER XIII:

  —

  SUCH SUCH LOBSTERS

  SO, they puffed. And as they puffed, they both together rose. (Or so said the Tale, the Tale which had made itself a bed in Alice’s ear.) Together both, they rose, until . . . from the uttermost tops of the tallest trees, the purplemist distance that surrounded them had also entered deep within them.

  So high! They’d climbed so high, Alice could extend her hand and almost touch those clouds—not those fumy, near-forgotten blues. Rather, that golden promontory, just beyond the nodding treetops, where she stood with her White Rabbit, taking in the wonder of this land of afternoon. All the scenes that seemed to flutter from the illustrated pages of that book, which had become the book of her memory . . .

  There, the Dodo and the Magpie, the Duck, Canary, and Eaglet, racing in their Caucus Race to nowhere. A race that never quite began, and yet never could
it end. A race that Alfred and she’d first acted out, and madly run, within their common London garden. She could almost see him there still, beneath their shared wild-cherry tree, pleading so irrepressibly:

  “Let me play the Dodo, too!”

  “But you’re already the Duck and Eaglet, the Magpie and Canary,” she’d countered, “to say nothing of the next bit, where you’re back as the White Rabbit.”

  “But,” he’d said, to end it, “you are still the only Alice.”

  And here she was, all these eras later, still so Alice. (Even dressed in her own Alice Dress!) Standing beside her true Rabbit-him, looking down on the ample lawns of an actual Wonderland. See, there: still barking, that Preposterous, Enormous Puppy! Pawing and panting, trampling whoever came near. (Suffice it to say, that role too had had to be Alfred’s. Still, she could see that twelve-year-old him: wagging, bow-wow-ing, chasing sticks, then bounding back on all fours, toppling her, near-slobbering all over her. Ahh, there had been moments, once he’d done with leaping, moments of him poised above her . . . when she’d catch some lively glint in those pale eyes of his, when she’d thought perhaps they’d linger, that finally they might . . . kiss? But, not. Not yet.)

  And speaking of classic Alfred roles, see, there: those two in formal livery, bowing to one another, the Fish and the Frog Footmen, one of them forever grumbling and griping, stooping behind her: the other, always rising, so pleased to greet her. Neither one ever letting her into the Duchess’s house; and yet, both of them forever letting her out again.

  And within the house—hear, hear!—the shrill, imperious Duchess, burping her baby so brutally, serenading him with a violent joy, promising the pig-nosed thing some pepper whenever he sneezed.

  And there, just there, as if through the worn, phantom pages of her mind, she could see . . . the Mad Tea Party, more mad—“More tea?”—more riddling than ever.

  And there, at the edge of a royal embankment, that large White Rose Tree, where cards Five and Seven were testily, if sloppily, painting every white rose red. There, that glorious Croquet Ground, with its endlessly curious Furrows and Ridges. And there, beyond the Flamingos and the Hedgehogs, beyond the lawn’s clipped edges, she could almost make out, on that Legendary Ledge of Lonely Rock, her poor Mock Turtle wailing. And beyond . . .