Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  “That, and tea,” said the Hare, declining to care.

  “Loathe tea!” the Dormouse dully declared.

  “Come, can’t we move on,” Alice urged more than requested. “Just one place on—from all this nastiness, this name-calling.”

  Seemingly repelled by her goody-two-shoes attitude, to say nothing of her fiendish ingratitude, the Mad Hatter scowled at Her Alice-ness: “All right, then. Since you insist: Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”

  “You tell me,” she replied, tight-lipped.

  The Hatter blandly adjusted his hat. “Well, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  With a maddening laugh, the Dormouse gawped, “She knows that.”

  The Hare could not hold back, “And yet, each time we see her, she still asks it.”

  “No. You ask it.”

  The Mad Hatter, pulled up, indignant: “And always and forever, she insists I give her the same answer.”

  “That there is no answer,” Alice said, pointedly averred. “I think you might do something better with your time than waste it asking riddles with no answer.”

  The Mad Hatter glowered. He glared. “If you knew Time as we do, child, you wouldn’t talk of wasting it.”

  Alice grimaced at the March Hare. “You waste time by not spending it.”

  “I daresay,” the Hare dared say, “you have never spoken to Time.”

  “We have spent so many years with him,” the Hatter alleged, “and you, you are just meeting him.”

  Gamely, the Hatter beckoned the March Hare. And up, together, they bounded, buckjumping from seat to seat. Just like Harold leapt, cot to cot, Alice thought. Articulating every jaunt of every vault, till they clambered onto the tabletop.

  “White Rab—Alf—do be careful!”

  Unflappable, unanswerable, that dynastic duo stood. Assuming now the statuary poses of certain pious politicians. (Without podiums, but with no less a mission.) His Madness the Hatter faced her down, as if from a lectern: “Time for you to riddle yourself home.”

  “Prithee,” burped the Dormouse, “pass the scones.”

  “Leave us alone,” the Hare droned.

  Well, there it was. Still, Alice stood her stubborn ground. “No, I won’t. It’s you who talk in riddles.”

  “Come,” balked the Hatter, “we live in riddles, child, and sometimes there’s no answering them.”

  Wordless, Alice looked to him. From underneath his riddling hat, some wounded Harold Pudding-look came back: “What leaves home as Mummy’s hero, then crawls back a less-than-zero? Like a teacup chip-chip-chipped, like an egg God dropped for kicks?”

  Alice stared, unsure. As if meeting someone so long forgotten, he no longer seemed familiar. “You?”

  “Ahh,” the Hatter sighed, “but I am no longer me.”

  Indeed.

  And on, sorely on, he went: “My mate, you know, was drop-dead funny. Then he dropped dead—isn’t that funny?”

  “Indeed,” the Dormouse seconded.

  “Indeed,” concluded the Hare.

  A proper pause ensued. For, never had a silence sounded, never had a sentence felt, to those tea-sipping souls, more eloquent. Till, finally, the Hatter seemed to snap to. And was his Hatterself again. Thoroughly insouciant, he turned to Alice: “More tea?”

  The Dormouse: “Hate tea.”

  That Pretend Hare, once more, tête-à-têtely to her: “Hate me?”

  “No!”

  “No tea?!” the Hatter spluttered, aghast.

  “She,” caviled the Hare, “and her incessant need!”

  “The next thing you know,” the Hatter dryly affirmed, “she’ll be demanding herbal tea.”

  Alice shook her head, in disbelief: “I don’t like herbs.”

  “Or Herb?”

  “Or tea,” said Alice definitively.

  “No tea?!” In mock-shock, the March Hare snarled at her: “Sooooo, you tell us now you’ve got a thing for tea?”

  Oh please. At her limit of mock talk and tea and mad venal mockery, some abyss, some growling maw, erupted within her—words spilling from her. Words directed toward Alfred, as if to exorcise the merciless Hare from him: “You can’t do this, you know. Can’t change what’s on the page.”

  “Like you, you mean?” replied those ardent Alfred eyes.

  And she, with her own X-ray glare, consigning him to a skeleton life: “I hate you—you know that? I hate you for getting sick. I hate you!”

  What’s left us then? she had time just to wonder.

  For now, and now, Time seemed to tumble from its stilts, shattering the great clock of the world. Splintering their Tale—annihilating all they’d made. Scuttling all the King’s horses and all the King’s men. All the toast, the tea, the chimneys, toppling; the emerald lawns and fountains scattering; all the bright, beckoning gardens, fallfalling into the dark. Ripping the rug of her life out from under her. Leaving only one sea-blood sunset, like in that painting of the exiled Napoleon. A universal blank surrounding him—the color of fire and ice and solitude. Everything, their everything, slow-motionly rupturing—as that Hare, her Alfred, fell fell, free-falling onto that table.

  “Stop! Stop it!”

  But there was no table to stop it. No Hatter or March Hare. No cloudless afternoon or fur-thatched roof. No, in the place of that book of Knowledge so fair, only that less-than-nothing hub. The dreary vertiginous Underground. Like some blank horizontal in a crossword, without any letters to hold the view together.

  Alice looked: there, beside her, her Alfred. But lying so lifeless, in his soiled hospital robe, on his sooty cot. Wheezing so raggedly. So drawn.

  “I didn’t mean it, Alfred,” she insisted, trying so hard to assure him, feeling how much with each word she kept losing. Losing him. “You know I didn’t mean it. I couldn’t!”

  “Ward D,” the Red Cross Nurse declared, sponging her way in. Eager to manage some fresh catastrophe. With a ruthless hand uprooting Alice, yanking the girl away, as she beckoned a stretcher. A renewed, tyrannical command: “Him. This instant.”

  Him—to Ward D? Alice looked about, wildly. “No—you can’t take him! Alfred! I wouldn’t!”

  “Hush now,” the Nurse commanded, grinding each word. Punctuating each beat with a fierce fingersnap. “Say your farewell.”

  There, look, just beyond: in the lamp-blank gleam from the ceiling, Alice could make out . . . a second stretcher? An injured young girl, staring glass-eyed from it. All bandaged, limbs immobile—in splints. Her clothing torn to rags, her thick-strewn hair, her eyes, her lips, full up with cement and dirt.

  Suddenly, surreally, White Shirts mustering. The Orderlies! Holding a fresh bloodstained stretcher.

  “Don’t!” Alice cried. “I won’t let you—”

  “Shut it!” the Nurse ordered. Clamping some medical lid over this too-too-unsanitary world, she cawed fresh orders to the Orderlies (as if to prove, once and for all, how on top of everything she was).

  But Alice cried out yet again—catching hold of Alfred’s stretcher, fierce in both hands. Tearing that stretcher from Alice’s grip, the Red Cross seized her. “Let. Him. Go.”

  “Nooooooo!” Alice howled. Her lunge toward Alfred thwarted by that Fascist forearm. “He’s not one of those. For Ward D.”

  With cold-blooded ease, that Nightmare Nurse did her best to tear Alice apart from her hands. Then, with a brisk, Florence Nightingale nod, she ordered those Orderlies off. And away away those troll-faced minions went. Taking Alfred, her Alfred, with them—divesting her of what little was left her, mauling every one of their oncegolden afternoons . . .

  Possessed by some force, by some righteous fury greater than herself, beyond her will, savagely Alice broke free. And lunged—from that Scylla of a Nurse into some Charybdian void of her grief—only to meet there the Good Doctor Butridge. Blockading, assa
iling her. “Awaaaaaaaaay!” jabbered he. “From that Hemoptystic . . . Hare.”

  “What?”

  “That, that . . . Buck Tubercular . . . With the Pneumothoraxic Paroxysmic . . .”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” Alice said. “You away!”

  “Beware!” he cursed. “Beware the . . .”

  “What?”

  As if his words fell silent, shamefaced to hear themselves, all the Good Doctor’s babbling abruptly stopped. Dried up. (It was like he’d always been so convinced of the righteous, therapeutic strength of what he said, that his words seemed, to some, to have some impregnable weight. Some imperishable worth. Stripped of that pretense, those mumbles resembled only the dangerous nonsense they actually were.) He blanched, he belched, he burped—one insensible word from her book. “Brillig.”

  “Please!” Alice pressed.

  “Tubercle Bacillic—” Burp! “Braelig.”

  “Stop it!” cried Alice.

  “‘Beware the Jabberwock!’”

  “The Jabberwock?!”

  Mouthless those lips hissed a hideous yesss: “Beware the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

  “No!” Alice cried. “You can’t have him. Let me by!”

  “‘Twas brillig and the slithy lobes . . .” The words came, fire-hammering, banging the decrepit Butridge right out of him. Summoning, from his customarily stooped form, an enormous Winged Phantasm. With an unctuous grating smile, trailing bat sails behind! Luridly, collectedly, leering. With sudden vulture nails—what?!

  Casting his clackety clipboards aside, that Demon Incarnate, that Incubus, lurched and hunched and eerily drew himself up; louring, towering, out of his usual Doctorly slouch, lashing a lacerating tail, baring pitchfork claws, and four fanged front teeth—until he looked just like that child-mangling beast from her book Through the Looking-Glass. The very picture of the modern Jabberwock. One more step, his fang-toothed stare seemed to say, and I’ll claw off your face.

  Those hellion jaws opened: “Brillig braelig uffish-ness and cryptic diagnosis. Words mean what we say they mean—and that’s the way it goes it.”

  Ah yes, Alice thought, it does make some dark sense. What was medical jargon anyway? Just so much dragon-speak, so much uffish-speak, to confound and inflame you. So, let him spew, let him say.

  The jaws splayed wider, and before Alice could utter another whatever, those vast and vorpal, ingrown claws caught her, those scrofulous thorny wings clutched her. A renewed, relentless stream of Jabberish assailed her—with a seismic wash of unspeakable loss.

  She fell to her knees. “Let go of me!”

  But, the Beast did not, he would not. He, and the million-fanged, demonic minions materializing around him. Like Time grown old, every one of them, breathing their fires upon her—through jaws of death.

  Like that fire decimating London, Alice thought. A fire so bright that, on nights when she’d raised her blackout curtain, she’d been able to read by it. And here it was, burning and blistering, blasting everything, everything from her. Virtually cremating her memories. Consuming every childhood street; tearing every stone from the heart of their common garden. Incinerating every chestnut tree, rooting out every elm beneath which they’d read; scorching every brick they never dared skip on their faux-Croquet walkway; reducing to nothingness all those turrets and eaves where, one year, that light, Peter Pan snow had fallen . . . All that, all of that, stripped from her, as those iron claws gripped, suffocating her, draining her, subsuming every syllable, every name for her grief. All of it nothing but idiot jabbering. As if every treasureword within her were part of a love letter mutilated by government censors. A dictionary cut into Christmas ornaments. Nothing left but mangled, meaningless gibberish.

  Tighter and tighter, those slithy toves held her, the gyre and gimble (to speak in Jabberwocky-speak); the teething-mouthed mome raths. See, the frumious Bandersnatch had her—he had her—choking the thought-chortled life-breath out of her. Cold hard medical hands clamping down. Holding her down down down. Confining her. The infernal Jubjub night, closing, beamish, over her.

  CHAPTER XVII:

  —

  “‘PLEASE’ AND ‘PUSS’?”

  SHE’D slept? Perhaps she had. Sleeping unsleeping in Wonderland time, in a Looking-Glass night. She’d dreamed? She had. Waking, wiping some nightmare like gunk from her eyes, she’d stood in what seemed like a palace of twilight. But then that palace, too, had disappeared.

  No one but she now. Opening her eyes still to see . . . a barestript Wonderland, such as she never had seen. A terrain robbed of all its tics, of all its vertiginous hills and ridges, all its near-delirious specificity. All that now a kind of blur. Only one spineless meandering stream between two deserted lawns. Like a book left open, so long unread, unremembered, that its every page had gone missing. No leaves, no wind. Only one red-golden sky, like some mirror of her mind. Bare outline only, of one solitary tree. Still no leaves. Only the unintelligible babble from a brook she could not see, a brook that, in fact, seemed rather grammatical and yet could not tell her the secret of its sorrow. For, Alice had as yet admitted no true sorrow to her depth and still had no firm notion of what real loss meant.

  So, she stood. But where was he? Some disconsolate wind passed, chafing the tree, chafing her cheek. She would simply stand and wait here. Would wait, till her fear dispersed, dissipated like the dust, like so much ghostblack ash on the London wind.

  Or no. She would not. She would run again—into the volatile night—just as she’d done on that catastrophic night, running from her house on fire. Again, now, she’d find him. But . . . how to run and where—when there was nowhere there? Only some blank Eveningland, where it was not even evening yet.

  But, there—beyond that lone-tree branch, in some insubstantial morning light, she caught a glint of . . .

  “Cheshire Puss?” Not a whisker stirred. “Cheshire Puss!”

  One faint caliginous gleam appeared. Alice pinned to it what hope she had: “Oh please!”

  Just enough mouth lingered, to emit a milky meoooooow: “‘Please’ and ‘Puss’? I like that.”

  Maybe so. But Alice heard, within those words, such a world of desolation. She had to get round it. She would! She’d launch herself forward, no matter to where—back, back, to that swarthy, thick-ribbed Underground, even to that Underworld Dungeon of Ward D.

  But now, that Chimerical Kitty materialized, like some harvest moon suspended, growing humongous before her.

  Sudden fangs—halting her! Alice ducked—tried to duck. But, there was no scooting under that low-bloating belly. On! She pivoted—Quick!—and pressed on.

  Lo! an endlessly lanky tail caught her. No Cat, just tail there; slinking, wagging, cowling-and-uncowlinging sulkily around her. Clinging. Alice shuddered: “He needs me, don’t you see? Let me past.”

  That disembodied mouth snarled (once there was enough mouth there to snarl). Impressing on the air its toothy glint, and leaving it silvering there—like the mirroring rim of that Tube-station clock.

  And with that cracked ticktock, Alice feinted left but bounded right. Only to watch enormous paws dislodge, spreading so vast, absorbing their own spread into the vacant air. Fur-flickering, darkening like some darker understanding of herself.

  Alice froze: “Don’t!”

  And now, Alice darted left, only to meet chaos in that calico mouth: a pair of sky-scraping incisors, the most monumental premolars. Looming. Mocking. No fun. Not friendly. When all Alice wanted really was to . . . run? But to . . . where? The unmapped space of some glowering nowhere?

  Whoknewwhoknewwhoknewwhoknew.

  For despite all the thoughts she might think about everyone else, in the end Alice felt so inevitably herself. And there was nowhere she could run that she would not find herself—even in finding him. Nowhere that she would not soon again be thinking and rethinking, expecting th
en regretting, mouthing second thoughts like this (forever caught in sentences with “I” in them). Nowhere she could be, that she would not be confronted, by some floating dental image of the world’s unyielding grin. And so? What was she to do to address that blank, armored resistance, those cat teeth that were (for the moment) her mirror and were rearing such defensiveness within her?

  But, what? She had to believe in the usefulness of doing. In something she could Do, in some way she could reach him. What else was the point of all this feeling, if not to make known, to make eloquent, at least to herself, who she was? She would not, simply would not, be a riddle without meaning.

  Determined, Alice spun about: “Cheshire Puss, please. Tell me, which way I ought to go from here.”

  The Cat Mirror chose to reflect nothing of what Alice chose to present—only her own classic grin: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

  “To him.”

  Alice waited—but only that insolent grin came, scintillant, back: those teeth like so many trace bullets, dissolving into the night, leaving only their trails of serpentine fire.

  All right, be like that. But where was she to go? “In truth, I’m now so lost.”

  “Then does it matter, really,” those incisors asked, “which way you go?”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “Of course. It must.” It only made it matter more.

  The Cat sighed, done: “Well, I’m sure you’ll wind up somewhere.”

  “Where?” She had to know. She had to ask. “It all keeps disappearing. The pages turn so . . .”

  “Quickly. Yes.”

  Alice foundered, “Why can’t he stay?”

  “The question is, when someone needs to go, ‘Whoooo are you’ to make them stay?”

  “But there’s so much left still—of our story!”

  Through the ember-like boughs, through the stellar pallor of the sky, that bare grin spread wide as wide: “That is the story, love. Always parting, always greeting.”

  So wide, so narrow now that grin, it seemed just about to disband, like some last indigent reef of evening cloud—