by Steven Sater
“No, don’t!”
Feline lips parted in speech: “It isn’t hard to say hello, it’s how we say goodbye.”
“All right, then,” Alice decided, rousing herself. “‘I shall find that golden key,’ and bring my Rabbit with me, ‘into that loveliest garden, to run among the flower beds and—’”
“Alice,” the mouth growled. “You cannot keep believing impossible things.”
“Sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the misremembering Alice replied.
There followed only a Cheshire Purr, without a word. Like the hum of thought evaded in the mind—something lingering because it had already gone. (A further intimation, if she needed one really, that only what departs from us can ever truly call to us.)
Still, Alice took the hint: “All I want is time with him. More time.”
“It isn’t how much time,” Puss clarified. “It’s how we use the time.”
“But he is always out of time.”
“Perhaps he hasn’t much to give,” the Cheshire hissed.
“But—”
Once more, that low low Cheshire purr: “Alice, pause, and let the picture in.”
“And then?” Losing all patience, Alice chided back: “Like, to be there, is to be in Wonderland?” Then, with a resolute shake of her head, “Enough of that.”
And with that, Alice turned her back on the stupefied Cat, and went. Startling a crack in the Looking-Glass.
And out out, like some last candle of twilight, went that notorious grin.
CHAPTER XIII:
—
A TERRIBLY GRAND TURTLE (I SHOULD THINK)
ASIMILARLY somber mood mantled the imperturbable camp, where Alice sat. Stranded in that ruminative Underground gloom. Trapped in some faded black-and-white illustration, after all the color pages she’d just known! But back, she was back. Suppressing every perception of the furtive rumbling aboveground, ignoring its warning of some fresh attack ahead. Finding (still finding) herself, unable to believe in anything, in anywhere—Here, There, or Otherwhere. And, therefore, finding herself unable to tale.
Oh, but someone among them still believed in tall-tale-ing. She, that ever so sensitive, that will-o’-the-wisp Mamie. She, too, stricken by all the fresh horrors without explanation. Under the cover of Lights Out, she nattered on, taking refuge from her utter inertia in the drone of her unending monologue, her monogrammed hankie busily shivering—like a sparrow who’d arrived too late to migrate, “At my Mum’s—you know, in Warwickshire—my Governess would say, ‘for children, all stories are true.’”
“All stories?” probed Nigel. With pointed scrutiny as if trying to distract himself from everything unnerving and unlovely (for example, that renewed, pre-raid grumbling), he perused the poker hand which Angus had dealt him—a pair of Threes, plus a useless Ten, Six, and King. “Three for me,” he requested, testily tossing his reject cards toward Angus’s deck.
Casually, over that deck, that gadabout Angus taunted the lad, “Hear that? That plague of Fritzy fighter pilots—gathering again? In their big-bad Heinkels and Messerschmitts? Let’s go get ’em, shall we?”
“Children,” that handkerchief resumed, “are always caught up in what is. Consumed by what’s in front of them—and never by what they’ve left behind or what’s just ahead.”
“Not her,” contended Dodgy, with a silent-movie eye roll toward Alice. Alice, who sat so rigidly silent, it was as if Talk itself had walked out on her. Chewing on that, on Dodgy went: “She’s always looking ahead, but with her head in her behind.”
Can we not, Alice thought. After all, it wasn’t about which stories were true. It wasn’t even about the truth. As her Nana’d said: “If nothing is written or said, then there’s nothing false or true. There’s only what is.”
“So, it is,” that haranguing hankie concluded, “that children have no real sense of future or past.”
It was always like this, wasn’t it? When one was waiting for someone, one felt them, their absence, so profoundly, one barely could bear anyone else being near . . .
Then again. What was it Cheshire Puss had said? “You can always indulge in some Magical Study of Happiness” . . .? But what was she to do with that? What but imagine him still on that cot, with those futile fig biscuits still as sweet as their past? . . .
“Up here.”
At that improbable purr, Alice stopped. (And just when she’d been telling herself such important thoughts!) But now, her eyes roamed the station, surrendering bit by bit to the hard fact of remembering it there again, obdurate as ever. Without her, again.
“Up. Here.”
Alice looked more profoundly into that gloom-penumbra. And there, above, across the track, she could just make out that near-familial gleam . . .
“How are you getting on?” the gleam asked.
Squinting a bit, Alice checked: were there ears enough there to hear? Even as she did, Tabatha spoke again:
“Join me, while I look for him.”
“Where?”
“I’m sure he’s wound up somewhere.”
“Alfred?” Alice stared, bewildered.
“Pudding. Harold Pudding. Red Alert out. They’ll be bombing any minute. Him, poor naked wretch, gadding about. Crying to his Freddie to ‘guard the rear!’ He won’t know where or what he is.”
“But I can’t leave him.”
“Who? Your Alfred?” that sandpapery tongue clucked.
“He’ll be back. Soon. He will.”
“We will, too. I’ve done this, often enough. We’ll get you back safe and sound. Back to your story, from just where you left it.”
“My story? No. Not without him.”
“Alice.”
“No. He wouldn’t want to skip a scene or miss a single beat. There are so many of his favorite bits still to come. The entire Trial, for examp—”
“Suit yourself, then.”
And with that, the glint went. Imperceptibly as summer, as some twilight inclination that one bats away. Some glowworm blinkering out. No one but Alice even noticing, as into the furnace-night above, that intrepid girl slipped. Leaving no bandaged grin.
Always parting, Alice reminded herself, always greeting. And yet, with each goodbye, she knew, something does abide. Some sensation sweet, as Papa’d say, felt in the blood and felt along the heart . . .
“Good night, Alice,” Mr. Hallam had said, with a reticent smile. “Good night, good night.” In that odd, husky whisper, every word like a still performance, seeming to offer but not offer her some mysterious blessing.
He’d surprised her, actually. On her way out. Stooping benignly beside the banister—the hair on his wide head, standing up, recalcitrant, on both sides of its part. As he bid her that good night. As he clasped her hand, with a sudden singular warmth.
Again that whisper: “Thank you for coming today, to see Alfred. For today, for all the days.” He swallowed. “Till tomorrow, then?”
“Of course. Yes.”
“It cheers him up, you know. It helps him so much. Even his rest. You do know that?”
“I think. Yes.”
Rising, with a valedictory nod, he led her to the front door, without a look back. “I don’t know where we’d any of us be without you, honestly. These last months. Well.” He paused and looked to her. Meeting her look, as if from a well of tears. “You’re all he talks about, really.”
Mr. Hallam, then. And now? Buried, scorched, in debris. Good night, good night . . .
“Ayy meee!” came a cry, echoing through the hollow Tube. Mamie?
Once more, as on those gutted London streets, Alice seemed to catch the refrain of someone else’s grief. (Grief, which sat, a moment, beside one Londoner, then beside another.) But then, what had she known of grief—beyond her book?
“Ayyy meeee
!” Nigel, no doubt.
With new-washed eyes, Alice shivered off her glooms. And sat relieved. After all, as Pastor William would preach: “Every tear is an intellectual thing, and every sigh, the sword of an Angel King . . .” Meaning? Maybe that our tears are weapons, really; shields to protect us against thinking we are everything.
Was that what Harold had meant, then—when he’d proclaimed, “No weapons, sir!” Was he simply saying he’d run out of tears?
Harold. Yes. She must go, help look for him. Certainly, she didn’t want Tabbie alone out there, exposed to shell fire again. “Tabatha?”
No answer. Alice’s gaze prowled the track, the steps, the high cold empty chink . . . No one.
“Tabbie?”
Not a meow. And now, Mamie it was (as always it was) who noted Alice noting the absence, and then just couldn’t stop noting it: rattling the entire atomic make-up of the station with a prissy “Look who’s not,” then a pithy “Guess who went . . .” Until that entire vagabond crew got caught up in it. Their bored eyes scouring above, beyond, and about:
“That Tab!” someone concluded.
“Running high tail after him.”
“Ayyy me!” some unknown voice bemoaned. A doleful moan.
Meanwhile, on the sassy set gabbed: “First, Pudding deserts his regiment—”
“Not to mention, his Freddie.”
“Then, us.”
“One less bedwetter.”
“Ayyy meee!” Who was that—Angus?
“Just shhh,” Alice wanted to retort, “no use grousing.” But, it seemed, no one but she could hear those sad “Ayyy Me”s. For, they all kept blithely on, like a chorus of talk that had subsumed all thought:
“And still that Tab goes after him? To what end?”
“The East End.”
“To lead him,” Mamie stewed, “to that hideous House of Abandoned Children she first ran away from.”
“Serve her right if she gets bombed out, too.”
“Boo-hoooooooo!”
Alice peered into the murmurous gloom. Remembering— or imagining, rather—and for no good reason really, those inconsolable sighs from her dolorous, old Wonderland chum. “Mock Turtle?” she called. “My Mock Turtle?”
At that unintended summons, she watched him—it must be him!—her Mock Turtle, suddenly near-numinously assuming his old familiar form. (And yet, inexplicably, stooped like that stammering Doctor; with chin erect and neck extended like Miss Mamie.) His carapace shell, ripple by ripple, manifesting his inimitable Mock Turtle–ness. Though not, as in her book, situated upon some lonely distant ledge—not all all alone beside the wide wide sea—but instead, just there, beside her filmy cot. In shadowy magnificence. With his moony calf’s head and ears, just like in the classic illustration from her book. But in place of those classic calf’s hoofs, with (rather more turtle-esque) flapper feet spread upon a sort of glowing night-light of a rock.
But, how odd it was that again, there—in the Tube with her?—this Wonderland Being was. “Turtle! My poor Turtle!” Alice called.
That woeful Magnifico looked back. All dolor. Sighing as if his heart, and flappers, too, would break: “Turtle? Me?” He sobbed portentously: “No, I am no longer a Turtle. Only a Mock Turtle.”
Longfamiliar words—but how unlike themselves they landed on Alice now. For, wasn’t that what she too had become?
She, and all the others huddled near. In equal ruin and mocked by all they once had been. What had they become, if not mock-thems? (Like grumblers left behind in some museum of their former lives: just they and those ghostly, Goya-like portraits, left in the dark after closing time.)
Oh so morosely that Mock Turtle mourned. “Oh dear dear me,” moaned Alice responsively, in an involuntary show of empathy.
“You mock me!” the Mock Turtle chided, retracting his heavy head under his shell.
“Oh, no, I assure you.”
His head tucked halfway out again. His wide bronze eyes blinked skeptically. “Then . . . what brings you to this grievous rock? This desolate grey reef?”
Given that Alice had not in fact departed to some desolate reef, and had no plan to anytime soon, she pondered how exactly to reply. Then began, brokenly, “My friend’s been taken . . . but I’ll be with him soon, I pray. There’s so much left still—of our story.”
“Ayy me!” the Mock Turtle fired back. “I told myself that too.” His bare shell heaved, a prehistoric heave: “If only you knew who I used to be.”
Down, down, Alice called to some rising sob within herself, as she gazed at him, admiringly. “A terribly grand turtle, I should think.”
“A baby grand, perhaps.”
Hahahaha, Dodgy laughed grandly, and Angus’s chortles echoed skeptically after. And were those Miss Mamie’s pearls, tittering, twittering?
Alice clocked those chortles and gestured dismissively. Seemingly, persuasively—for the snickering largely settled—or grew less acrid, anyway.
Must be some joke of their own, Alice surmised. For surely, they had no notion of that Magisterial Mourner, that Soulful Sea Reptile, bellowing just beside her. No more than they ever could know the mourning within her—the mourning for how little she actually felt. Even now. She, who’d always kept so distant from herself, never truly participating in her own experience—effectively living as if she were someone else. Meanwhile, consoling her bandaged soul with some revisionary tale: about how well she’d done, about how good she truly was, about how loved she was. And therefore how well, in the end, everything would work out.
“Such a salty story, really,” the Mock Turtle sobbed. Such a salt-sea sob! “I can’t tell it.”
“Really?”
“Not a word until I finish,” he scolded. “Please.”
It was all Alice could do, really, to sift through the summits and terrible plummets of his Melancholia, to discern some muttered word. All the more trying, as she was trying so hard to resist a mourning all her own.
But on the Mock T sobbed. No words for his grief—no way, presumably, to articulate its enormity. Still, Alice tried to nudge him politely: “Sorry. I don’t see how you can finish if you never start.”
At that, he whimpered, wailed—swallowed and subdued by each Sisyphean sniff: “Once . . .” Sob! “Once when I, like you—”
“Not me,” resisted she.
“Once when I had my Tortoise still with me . . .” he sobbing sighed, the silt dribbling from his eyes. “Well, we called him ‘Tortoise,’ because, of course, he taught us.”
Alice nodded. “My friend and I,” she just managed to say, “we went to school together every day, though now our school’s been blown away.”
“Ayyy meee!” some new mouth wailed. Assailing the void and vacant air—to say nothing of her.
But, who could that be? Weeping-and-wailing, a ways away, so plangently! Whoever it was, the Mock Turtle redoubled his sobs, as though not wanting to be outdone.
“Ayyyyyy meeeeee!” he echoed, elongating each vowel, his hard shell rattling from all the chest-banging.
But who, exactly, had heaved that first “Ayyy meee!”?
Alice dispatched her gaze. And there, beyond those ever-hovering smoke rings, slumped some second Mock Someone. On Mamie’s cot, or rather, on some pile of stony rubbish, some seat of desolation, just beside. Never had Alice seen such a splendid, sulking thing. “Now, who is he or she?”
“Ayyyyyy meeeeee!” the Mock Turtle sighed. “A Mock Mock Me. A mockery!”
And now, what a competing flood of sobs burst forth from that Mock Mock Turtle. Such cloudy, lugugugubrious ululations!
“I knew Tortoise, too, you see.”
“Yet, it all began with me,” Mock Turtle evinced, in rival grief.
“Nay, me,” the Mock Mock bawled defiantly. “In truth, he thought you were a Drama Queen.”
“Meee?!”
A cry of chortles issued once more from those dusky corners. Anonymous lostchild chortles, from within that palpable obscure. Kerfuffled, Alice peered around. Trying hard to make out—from the muddle of umber faces and forms—some little touch of Nigel, some defining glint of Mamie, in the night. All of them so hushed in some congregation of silence. (Like openmouthed angels in that medieval Nativity painting; their features so pale, they seemed more stone than angel.)
With a wave of her half-dreaming hand, she turned again to the Mock Turtle. But for one weird mirrormoment, she seemed to see only herself there—moaning. As though she’d fallen asleep reading about him and had woken to find she’d become him. But no—surely, she was the one listening, or mock-listening, not the one moaning . . .
And ohhhhh, the cries that now arose! All the baleful bawling, kvetching, and intoning. That Mock Mock sternum throbbing so pronouncedly, as he (or she) declaimed (so conspicuously): “Ahh, the life my Torty and I had—before the Crash! How huge we hoped to be! . . .”
Ayyy meee. Had Alice’s whole world become some Mock Mock Turtledom? Had all of London been grieving so long that its citizens had been turned to stone? Had constructed, each one for themself, some unfeeling shell, some polar-block version of themself, beneath which they could recede and sleep in peace?
Maybe so, Alice thought. But not she. Yes, her world might be emptied, but not she. She would not become some Mock Me.
And still. Amid all those jitters and jeers, some quiet pulse of a loss still to come, some quickening surmise of grief, seemed to course through her, to touch some sense of loneliness she always held somewhere else, like some goblin whom she skirted in the dark, afraid even to see. A sudden fresh palpitating wail: “Ayy mee!” But who was this?
Some stooped Mock Mock Mock Creature, peering from under a yarmulke and tallit of foam? Moaning cantorially: “I was halfway through my Haftorah when my Tortoise plopped. Swept out to sea! Oy me!”
“Ayyy mee,” came some infernal Throb. And the entire station thrummed, between two roaring crowds: “Nay, me!” “Nayy, meeeee!”
