Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  How, Alice asked, as she took in those wonders—more wonderful still, for transporting her again to those first moments they’d played them together—how, she asked, could she hold so many memories? So many already! How, as she lived, and each day remembered, so many more, even commonplace, instants, how would she house them all? And as she got older? Was she to become one of those women she’d see—those solitaries in wan brown scarves on odd park benches—stooped from holding so much that they’d lived through? Their eyes no longer taking in where they were, as if it would cost them too much to have more to remember. Sitting so motionless, befuddled in wonder, near-turned into monuments themselves . . .

  So, maybe she should start Un-remembering? Seriously. Should start concertedly unraveling all the years, all the feeling, the entire future she so had believed in. Truly, she’d trade in the whole life she’d lived—she would—if she could only be here. If she could only stop all the thinking and unthinking and simply be here, this moment, with him. Once more in Wonderland. From these mystic treetops looking on.

  Really, she ought to be showing her White Rabbit, ought merely to be marveling with him, at all the intimate splendor below them. There he was, of course, all Rabbit-wriggled up, beside her on a broad and yawning branch; seemingly dazzled, himself, by that lone glimmering leaf—as if it were some mystic insignia of the spring (of which the first leaf is the tale of coming leaves).

  Say something. “The, uh, treetops!” she marveled. “I have never seen the treetops!”

  “Not from the treetops,” wryly he replied.

  She smiled. “And see, beyond that lonely rock, the Mock Turtle’s Rock—”

  “The Mock Rock?”

  “Precisely,” she agreed. “See—all the waves of the sea, lapping still, still so. And on that pebbled shore—there, that legendary Quadrille, the stately waltz of all those gorgeous Lobsters.”

  “Such such Lobsters!” he marveled. Then confessed: “I am finding myself oddly hungry.”

  “Not the Lobsters!”

  And with that, she tapped his hand and, for the first time ever in Wonderland, had to suppress a certain bashfulness: “I mean, I do so love the Lobster Dance . . .”

  “Yes, of course,” he blinked, he batted back.

  Lord, what a pause ensued. A pause, it seemed, they both were in, but neither knew just how they’d gotten in. Oh dear oh dear, thought Alice. Why must she always keep wanting something more from him? Tripping them both up, into some Absurdist pause, by all her rethinking, by her endless angling. In place of just letting be.

  And there, where it seemed only Alice could see, there drifted some—what?—ears? Some mouth of cloud? Some Cheshire tongue releasing a fond familiar hymn: “Oh will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you . . .”

  Was that a prompt? That child-rhyme from their book, it was. Hmm. Maybe she could lead with that?

  Once more through blinkered looks, she caught his glance. And certainly, half-certainly, she chanted that old storied chant: “Will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”

  His nose twitched. His ears flinched. “But I’m not in that dance. Not in the book, I’m not.”

  “Not yet,” that Cheshire purred—but only Alice heard—from that seeming mouth of tumbledown cloud.

  And now, some irrepressible star seemed to rise in the grey lamps of Alice’s eyes. She looked to the White Rabbit, surprising him with her own Cheshire grin. “Not yet.”

  White Rabbit flushed. A peony-pink blushing up rose-red. And so . . . self-conscious. He could not dance. (Surely, she knew that.) (He knew she knew that.) (Sure as sure, they both knew that.) He never could dance! “You wouldn’t want to, really—with these ears?”

  “The dearest ears,” she (pseudo) deduced, surveying them.

  “But, I’m all paws.”

  “Aren’t we all?” clucked that Cat-ical tongue. Letting a bit of steam out of the neighboring clouds.

  “Well, I’m all soles and eels,” an emboldened Alice ventured. Remembering forward, he smiled a bit. And so she smiled again. But still he nothing said—and so she nothinged back. What next? What next?

  Well, you can pause and pause—and pause, Alice thought. Or maybe Chesh thought. But by now, all trace of Cat had disappeared. Only Alfred left. With the Alfredest look on his face, a look which seemed written in a language known only by her . . .

  Ohhhh, but she could sense him, poising himself, within himself, upon some dizzy precipice. “Now, shhh,” she pronounced. And resumed their chant:

  “You really have no notion how delightful it will be,

  When they take us and they throw us, with the Lobsters,

  out to sea . . .”

  “Alice, Alice, we can’t!” he protested. Half-against himself.

  “Yes, we can. Here, in our own Wonderland, we can.”

  Knowing well the rhyme, he came back:

  “But the snail replied, ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance—

  Said he thanked the whiting kindly—”

  “Please!” she urged, through laughter.

  On he went:

  “. . . but he would not join the dance,

  Would not, could not, would not—”

  “Can, can, can.” She lapped him in that laugh. And as he paused, she pointed. Down down they looked—farther than far, to where, below them, twirled the Lobsters. Printing a golden path in the still more golden sand. With her Rabbit rapt in wonder, Alice curtsied and discreetly took one gloved paw, then another—in her ungloved hands.

  And a music crept upon them—from the waves, perhaps, from all the weltering shadows of those wavewhite mermaid waters, which seemed to lap their darkness on the sand. A music which they could not comprehend, and yet which somehow comprehended them.

  When you partner

  With a Lobster,

  All the world’s your shore . . .

  With that moody flood of words and notes, with the twining stresses, two by two, the Rabbit seemed to lose himself (or almost) in those dulcet sounds, which, on his spirit, made a music too. Music, like a melody from the other side of memory, a tune she also seemed to hear, which held her spellbound too—as she led him, paw in hand, from that chandelier of tapering trees onto a carpet of air, a carpet that unfolded from a cloudless vault of heaven. And there, within the blue beyond, she held him near. They waltzed. He, with a brisk titubation of those dearest ears, displaying a surprising mastery of each step; maintaining, even as he moved, that gorgeous immobility one sees in world-class waltzers—

  WAAAAAAAWAAAAAAAW!

  A siren wailed—some air-raid siren. But . . . here? Like a cry from the broken world, through the spine of night, sending some sonic rip through Wonderland.

  Alice grabbed for her White Rabbit—every illustration fluttering below them; every paragraph sputtering; each phrase loosed; whole chapters, spewing raw their drawings from a wash of rained-on colors—as he groped, groped madly, madhotly, for his pocket watch. His proper watch. Was it only that, then? No actual siren, only his alarm bell going off? An alarm on a pocket watch? Indeed, it was. Awful, hectic, clamorous, loud as loud. (As if bell after tormenting bell were battering the belfry, breaking down the bellman from the tower.)

  One impertinent watch he yanked out—struggling to contain the anxiety that came rising with it, enormous as Time. A nightmare, from which he could not wake. Something fierce as History, defying him to shut shut the screaming off, to shutshutitdown, shut it up!

  Stopstopitwatch! Pockpocketwatch!

  Keeeeeeeeening! He clamped the glowworm watch face. He pressed the pin, each importunate button. No luck. He yanked out another impudent watch. He clamped. He pressed. Still it kept sounding. From somewhere. Like a scream escaping, striating the sky. Infuriating! Out he yanked another watch. Pressed it. Hating it. Hating himself hating it. Stop
stopstopstopstopit! I beg you. But . . . no. He tried another. No. Another. Nonononono . . .

  Alice squeezed her eyes shut tight. So tight, and suddenly: the sound—no sound? It had ended? Yes. Without an echo? Yes. Only some bottomless moan from the sea below. Intently, she turned to her Rabbit, relieved—

  But he, frantic, still so out of breath: “Oh, dear dear. So much—such a muchness still to finish!”

  “Just . . . please,” she urged. “One minute more, on this page.”

  “This page?! What page?! We’re not even on a page.”

  “We can change what’s on the page.”

  “No no,” he cried, “you can change. The page can’t change.”

  His chest and waistcoat heaving—with a spasming arithmetic—stumblingly he started off.

  “Please! No!” she cried. “One more minute!”

  “Oh, we all know about minutes,” he contended, every word suffering its own conniption fit, recoiling back upon him, “how they start out merely minutes—seeming minutes. Soon, each second, it’s a minute, and the minutes run like seconds, till they’re hours—running, slipping—years and years—gone, gone, gone.”

  “But they’re not,” she reassured. “Not here, they’re not.”

  “Gone. Gone. I’m late! I’m late!”

  “For what? Croquet? I’ll come.”

  “Alice, stop. Please,” he urged. “This isn’t just some silly game. I have no time left—not for this.”

  “There’s time. There will be time.”

  “No,” he mourned, more gravely still. “If you knew time as I do . . .”

  “But I don’t. I only measure time by when I’m with you and when I’m not.”

  Violently, the Rabbit shook—and, with that, shook some earth-cry loose. A siren screamed, and the screaming held across the sky. Then Alice, too: “Stop stop, please!”

  All at once, she lost him—lost him, falling. She, too, with him, falling, falling, down down doooooooownnnnnn, through the fiery clouds, those colder embers of the dying day.

  Still falling, through the oncegolden sky to a world of night. Toward some siren keening, crying for night.

  The two of them, falling—wordless—like the night. Or was it, rather, they who were bringing the night? The darkness spilling from them, suffusing Wonderland. Or . . . had this archaic, broken-spined night, dotted with dust-bits of parchment, ever been Wonderland?

  Regardless, still they fell. Fell falling past those fleet, Third Reich death-gliders, rising as high and bright as the phalanx of stars. Inscribing bright trails with their smoky flight, leaving smoke turrets and spires and towers behind them. Until, it seemed, all the silvered architecture of the city-night had been transposed to the sky, and the dark veil, which once had made night of that sky, now obscured the widowed face of the darkworld below.

  There, as they tumbled, lay London. But a London blacked out. With all its conscience-riddled streets, impatient to resume their world. There, the East End, only blistering embers. There, King William Street, in ruin. Not a light in Piccadilly. Nor on Fleet Street. See, the Marble Arch in darkness. The Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, too—so dark. So dark. They’d all gone into the dark.

  Only there, beyond—the parched horizon slit by glittering tongues of fire. As if the eviscerated city were some charred and fiery log, just struck, which sent forth innumerable sparks: like so many grisly auguries of future cities under siege, of refugees to come, of children hanging from wrecked tanks or playing dolls on stacks of shells . . .

  Down down down. A city ripped from silence. By this sole unholy siren. Not a chime from a single cathedral. Not a tower tolling some reminiscent bell. Not a telescope gazing up into heaven. Nothing, no one calling. No train running. No world, no sound, of London—of all that hum that made it London.

  Darkness. Not a searchlight even—not a car light—only those white markings on the curbs and bollards. No one out—no, only her Alfred and she, falling toward those blackened streets. Just bodies wholly body, falling. Down, through some bunkered shelter, where children huddled among vaults of corpses.

  Down down, past some huge-mouthed tunnel. Through the catacombs, it seemed. Through a monastery of dead monkish bodies . . .

  Down, through some wasteworld unearthed below—past a layered crypt of Anglo-Saxons. (Their bared heads an oblivion within those lost bone-houses.) Below them, ancient Britons; and all they were was ivory—their bodies, wooden shroud pins. No more pearls even for eyes.

  No, only . . . layers of mold, below them: loam gone numb. No maggots on those dry white bones. Only Roman relics and remains, with nothing beside—and still below . . . the empty heaps . . . the void and formless deep; the infinite emptiness, boundless and bare.

  On, on, still they fell, through the lampless night, with the wounded and dead, to their birthgrave of Mother Earth.

  “Till here,” Alice said. And pointedly paused. Her recitation paused.

  A mouth, from the gloom, Nigel wondering: “‘Here’?”

  Dodgy: “As in?”

  Angus: “Just . . . here?”

  Alice sat, too paused to ponder. Still too nowhere. Then she felt her head start nodding: Yes.

  She looked about—and here she was. Within that browned familiar Underground world. Upon the cot-webbed platform once again. She in her bed; he, in his. Once more, here: amid the clammy walls, the dismal scents, all those treasured, dog-eared pages scattered on the tracks. The sleepers, too, still there—sleeping somehow on, beneath the screeching siren so unending.

  CHAPTER XIV:

  —

  A THIEVISH PROGRESS OF DARKNESS

  SURELY the worst of it, with a siren, was the aftershock of silence. The waiting, Alice thought, the charade. The mad denial—of all it truly meant, of what would come next. There, that mongrel-Nurse, maintaining a studied calm, but back on the prowl. (Like some corrupt friar, preaching and condemning, casting her spells—meanwhile, banishing everything truly spiritual.) And there: Nigel and his thumb, rockrocking, muttering, “Mummy, this can’t be it. Not yet it. Not not like this!” Meanwhile, Miss Mamie, restacking her solitary holiday trinkets, protesting that no indeed, the world could not be at an end. Not yet! On Thursday, Auntie Beardsley was throwing her a birthday party—at Liberty! The entire civilized world was to be there. Naturally. All the while, as she chirpedchirped on, Dodgy, mockmocking, tepee’d in his blanket, with his haughty chin held high as high, holding some imagined phone in hand: “Roger that. Adolf? Dodgy here—listen up. It’s Mamie’s birthday—and the bombing’s such a bore. Could you put a pin in it?” The while, Angus puffpuffing on his yellowing pipe, saying how much he hated the sound of the siren fading away. Hated knowing it was headed somewhere else, that it soon would be sounding for someone else—someone he might never know, somewhere he might never be . . .

  And . . . Alice? No denying she, too, was waiting, mute, inattentive, uncrumpling her thoughts like some school-paper wad. And so deliberately dithering. Lost on some map of what-ifs. Like on those ghostcold nights she wouldn’t dare climb out of bed, for fear she might never get back there again. All awkward, without any ballast, unwashed as her blouse, on this dismal cot. Impersonating herself, for herself, again. She, whose shadow surely ought to be endless. Ought surely to extend beyond that curvilinear Tube-station wall, beyond that white-glazed round—far beyond those cold glinting tracks. But it did not. Merely sat there, stiff and inhospitable as she.

  Some moments, sure, she’d sat. But since then, since she’d paused—since she’d become a sort of pause—how long? Mere moments? Hours? Whole stretching cycles of years? Years of this, her Night Nine Self, sitting, straining her comical neck, to make her periodic checks on him. (With no return but that blankcurtain glare.) In the meanwhile, clocking the wastrel crew, who’d remained all winter in London, as she had—to get through “these dar
k days together, in the bosom of the family.” All of them huddled, as she was, beside the coldshoulders of those shadowy tracks. All of those mother-less tykes, with whom she could soon be blown to bits. Each of them, like her, alone in some room in their head . . .

  . . . Like all those lonechild faces beside that railway station, Alice remembered. A year ago, September, wasn’t it? With the dismal brown wind, like some hollowmouthed radio announcer, howling about the effect of the war on the weather.

  There she’d stood, beside those coldshouldered tracks. With Alfred, watching those queues of ghosteyed children. Children soon to be evacuated, armed only with gas masks and diminutive suitcases. Mere children, sent from London, dispatched from their families, in order to escape the nightly sieges. Homeless children, really.

  Could as well have been Alfred and she, boarding a train without their Dad or Mum, departing to who knew where. Through some cracked (assuredly, unhinged) window within her, an icecold child hand seemed to branch into Alice’s chest. Gripping so hard her knees near-buckled under her.

  “Come, Alice,” Alfred urged, catching her, setting his firm warm hand on her shoulder. In reassurance that their world, and they, were there still.

  “Come now, home now, Alice,” he prodded, “your Mum must have you home with her. If a raid comes tonight, as of course it will . . .”

  “Of course, yes,” she mustered, and started homeward with him. Only to feel those icefingers within her, and to turn right round again: “But where will they all go?”

  “To Somerset. To Derbyshire. To some rural somewhere. They’ll be safer in the country. There’ll be fewer raids, or no raids—”

  “But they’re children!”