Alice by Heart
Page 18
“Alfred?!”
CHAPTER XX:
—
ISN’T IT A TRIAL?
A MIRAGE or a miracle, was it? Or a riddle made visible? For, everywhere around Alfred and her spread the shadowy platform, and yet, it was as if this strip of Underground station had been transformed into some undiscovered corner of Wonderland.
See, up from the glinting-steel tracks, toward the trains, which, these slow-traveling nights, never passed; over the cold, umbrageous platform; over the empty cots; along the station walls; and curling luxuriant over the rafters and railings—bloomed the most resilient and royal white roses. Their faces peering argent from the dark, in silent protest of all the barbarous London loss. Roses. So many spotless white roses. Making of the makeshift shelter a kind of marvel: a subterranean wartime garden in bloom.
But Alice could barely take in the wonder, so struck she was to see him. Her loved friend. “You’re here!”
“I had to,” Alfred insisted. “To finish it. With you. We could not end like that.”
Alice nodded, felt herself nodding, gone mum. How pale he looked! Tremulous. His gaze seeming to swim toward and away from her; with a swerve of such self-conscious regret. The look of a soul that has to stay where it is.
“Alice, come,” he beckoned. “The Trial.”
“What? No!”
“We must,” he entreated. His breathing heavy from the effort it cost him.
“No!” she said again simply, shaking her head, her matted tufts of hair falling in protest down her forehead. “I won’t. I know what’s next—after the Trial.”
Setting a firmfrail hand on her hand, he importuned her, “Then, please. We’re late.”
“No,” she said once again, allowing but not taking his hand. “I’m staying here. With you.” He had to stay—of course he did—if there were still chapters ahead. “There cannot be a Trial without me there.”
“Alice!”
“I shall never leave this page,” she declared. “We’ll simply stop the story here.”
“Alice, I can’t!”
But he could. She knew he could. I can, he can . . . Though now, it seemed, there was nowhere for her to look, nowhere that would not intercept his look; his eyes, so intent on hers, as if to look away too long would breed in him some thought too deep for tears.
“Perhaps,” he attempted, “we were never meant to . . .”
“Yes, we were,” she urged. “We are. We still can be. Forever. Here.”
His face contracted, something crumpling within him. Now what had she done? Oh no no. Why must everything she said be like a spell? A spell she cast upon herself—and him. Truly, all she’d meant was . . .
Too late. Alfred spasmed. He couuuughed. A bruising cough, seeming to shut him out of the book of himself, spewing blood. And with each successive cough, every white rose turned red.
“No!” Alice cried, turning and turning, taking in, not taking in, the mark of blood on every rose.
“Alice. Please.” He took hold of her arm. Imploring her.
“But, your roses . . . !”
“Yes,” he said, so somberly. “They are as roses are. As roses, here, must be.”
Because we paint them with our fear? Because we glut our sorrow on them? But no, not that. She could not taunt him—not now; she could not presume or demand like that.
“I’ve got to reach the end,” he pleaded. Some hectic red crease suffusing his cheek. “Just this once more.”
“I thought that when you knew a book,” she offered, “you had the chance to have it as you always want to have it in your head.”
Alfred forced a fitful smile: “It doesn’t always end as books would have it end.”
What then? she thought, but that too passed unsaid. As she caught again his rose-lit eyes upon her.
“I’m a rabbit in a waistcoat, really,” he stated, so plainly. “Running out of time in Wonderland.”
“But how shall I be here without you now?”
So near she was, she felt she almost could touch the frightened soul, the actual animating intellect, within him. Him just here, warm-kindled, beside her. She reached and he did not resist as she drew him to her. In the full rush of emotion such that she could not yet find herself in. She, ever so thoughtful. Ever so pulled up. So interminably self-interrogating. Forever hounded by her own identity. Where was she in this?—with this, her fierce desire meeting his faint embrace?
Abruptly he drew back. “Alice! No—you mustn’t get too close.”
She leaned closer. Summoning every ancient god and goddess within her, to be here now, to smile and descend in whatever golden chariot, to help her convince him. Why why should life divide what their death might join together? “Take me with you.”
“What?!”
Still closer she leaned, demanding a kiss. Her first, their first, yes. Please, please, just this. “Drink me.”
“No no.” His eyes choking. “And lose you, too?”
“I’ll be there. Always. With you.”
“Alice, no. It’s just me they want.”
Keep me with you. “I hear them calling, too.”
His eyes upon her did not turn away. Let me ask him, with my eyes, to ask again. And then he asked her, with his eyes (he did, she knew he did). And she set her arms around him—still him, just him—she urged her lips toward his. To kiss him into roses, to wake him, more than wake him, to wander with him here, forever here. That moment she could feel her lips so near, just brushing his—
And he—that moment . . . stopped. Pulled back. Stiff. He stared at her. Through her. And his voice came, clamorous—like the twin of his vision. A peal as if from Gabriel’s horn. The voice of the Trial itself: “Silence in the Court!”
What what was he afraid of? “Don’t!”
But, that moment, a hideous, spine-chilling scream, some fable-shrinking shriek, rived them apart, sending a spidery crack through the mirroring air.
“Off with her head!”
No no no—not yet!
The Queen, the Queen. TheQueentheQueentheQueen! With one Reptilian look, seeming to drain every drop of their red-and-white blood.
Stop! You can’t have him! You won’t take him!
No guilty shame seized them. Merely they looked on one another. Abhorring the abhorrence. Each from themself recoiling.
And then and then, before Alice could blanch . . . With a zero-at-the-bone prompt from Her Majesty, the White Rabbit mounted the platform. Assuming his by-the-book role as Chief Royal Herald. With a grave and Courtly demeanor, announcing, “All rise for the Queen.”
Look at him, like some palepale fist, all the red life draining from him. So alone with the alone, still in his shivering hospital robe.
On reflex, it seemed, he had summoned the tale again. To protect her from him, from the illness fast consuming him. (A tale now left so untold, a tale no longer theirs, really.)
Still. For all her reserve, for all her finely honed sense of comme il faut and Wonderland propriety, Alice could not but cry out: “Noooooooooooo!”
“A page too late for all that, I’m afraid,” the Queen of Hearts declaimed (which is to say, merely enunciated. For to proclaim, in so regal a way, was to reframe the world as your personal statement, to hear on every tongue, and in every refrain, nothing but yourself in solemn quotation).
Taking her King by the hand, ushering him toward the platform (but always one step behind and beneath her) on the Queen blandly went: “Love, love, love, love, love—make me puke.”
Love? Alice pondered. “Love”—really? Never, in all her life, had she felt less represented by the venom being spit in her direction.
Alice paused, letting her glance travel over that Dread Queen again. Over her blundering form in those buttressing robes. Over those feet, too proud for the painted earth beneath. Over that pr
ominent nose, each nostril so assured of the devotion of the roses and wind, the woman hardly needed to breathe to breathe in. She, with that Heart on her chest, such a still and awful red. Why, Alice thought, she could as well be . . . that Red Cross Nurse!
Surely, she thought, Alfred could see it. She looked—but he stood rigid. As if he were taking refuge in incomprehension. His eyes like polished Christmas windows (when there was Christmas still in windows)—artificially brightened, and beribboned. What was he doing? Just barreling ahead? Did it really mean so much just to get to The End?
Wholly oblivious to anyone having a thought or sensation other than her own, that Queen of Hearts fastened her low-lantern gaze on that negligible husband of hers. He, poor thing, some mere he, who could not but project what a sad thing it was to be King, if to be King meant to rule overruled by that Queen.
Eager to underscore that theme, with a nod toward Alice, the Cross Queen hissed at the man’s shrinking ear: “Well, at least she brought her head.”
Fearing perhaps to lose his, that sage King hmmph’d: “That’s good.”
Then, like some nearsighted troll, peering at Alice’s throat, grossly the man grinned. (Picturing, perhaps, some sun-dream guillotine, on some historic scaffold, in some French and/or Russian Revolutionary Square.)
Not that that regal Queen cared. With an air of the sublime, and the certain sense that even the slightest flick of her wrist carried with it the Law of God and Control of the Deck, she lifted a pinkie, blessing the air. (And the sky behind her adjusted its light, to show Her Highness only at magic-hour angles and only from her better side.)
She paused. As one does. She took in each Heart, each Club, Spade, and Diamond, bestowing on each, in turn, her imperious glance—as if she were permitting each star to pass Go and succeed the following star in the dark course of heaven.
Good good, Alice thought. Keep her occupied. Better that the Queen overlook her completely. But Alfred?
“Well, I am proud”—that monarch swelled—“so proud, to behold this record-breaking crowd.” Warming to her theme, with a petulant peek about, she demanded King-Learially, “Which of you can we say loves us most?”
A royal pause followed. Not a word, not a perfunctory clap, not a “hmmph” broke the air. A perfect vacancy wafting toward Her Majesty—like the perfume of a world she was not made for—and would not endure. (A silent and indifferent deck? A rumored row of empty seats? Not a thing a Queen like she would bear.)
Ever politic, and knowing his dear, the King coughed fustily, nudging the Knave standing near.
And. The. Knave. Just. Stood. There. Curling his profiled self into a kind of mustachioed curlicue.
Pivoting, nailing the King with a mad-red glare, the Queen importuned, “Yes?”
At an understandable loss, but doing his husbandly best, the King began, “Never has there been . . . a Queen . . .”
Sensing that sentence about to fall off a cliff, the Queen glared more glaringly. “Mm?”
“Who has accomplished”—that royal Adam’s apple bobbed—“so much.”
“And?”
“And . . . and . . . who has done so many . . . things.”
Such a speech was not soon to be recovered from! An ecstatic cheer swelled from the crowd. In voices numerous as space. It washed over the land, bringing forth flowers of every hue, and a shade greener than green from the lawns and trees. A redbreast whistled, and a choir of birds stood witness, choiring—with every harmonious cry imparting to her Majestical self something still more ineffable. Her Majesty smiled: Queen again.
What next? Alice stood, still as still, unsure; like a creature of some strange new race, wrecked solitary here.
Pssst, she heard White Rabbit psst. Blankly she stared at him—what was he doing? Blankly he stared back—what was she? For inasmuch as yes, he was capitulating, she was completely stalling. This was their book, and she was the one, after all, who’d convinced him, had conducted him here, to do it with her. Their last chance.
And yet, her look said, did they have to end like this? Couldn’t they just turn back a page? Couldn’t they flip boldly back through—and do all those celebrated bits she’d so recklessly skipped? They could spend all afternoon, they could, just doing them? And maybe, then, each moment would offer not only itself, but also the means of their keeping it . . .
Or would it not? Could they not? Stories had laws, after all. And perhaps every book, even their book, held something inviolable. How could she transgress against her own myth and expect any good to come of it?
(And beyond that, Alice knew, every good book requires so much. Demands so much. First, from its writer, who never is up to the task of fulfilling their book’s egotistical demands; then, from the reader, who’s left to contend with something in herself she can never understand. Some discontent too exquisite to tell.)
“Alice, quick!” the Rabbit warned again, his fur like a bundle of shivers. As the Queen leaned dangerously near. Surveying Alice’s delicious head and neck . . .
Finding herself in a place not her own (and worse, not really of herself), and meanwhile being less than royal, and not exactly an invited guest, Alice reasoned that, despite whatever slights she’d incurred, she ought to approach, ought even to curtsy—to acknowledge, with some bob of her knees, those florid, High-and-Mighty Cards. And so, she did.
“Your Majesties.”
Pursing her lips, the Queen of Hearts swatted that blue stumbling buzz from anywhere near: “‘Majesty’? Oh please. They’ve bombed my home, too. The north-by-northwest wing, anyway.”
Utterly confounded, Alice looked to Alfred—but he did not seem to see her. Or, would not show he did. For to show himself at all was to show such feeling. To show fear, she thought. His fear of an ending.
She wanted to cry out again, but before she could summon a word, that Queen usurped, slurp slurp, all verbiage: “Come back for another look, have you? And found yourself too big for picture books? Too huge for fools like us?”
Sorry, what? Alice’s lips parted, buuuut—
That Regal Tongue would suffer no impediment. Indeed, one dared not try to apprehend—rather, one simply was, and did—whatever the Queen said. (Why, even to speak the Queen’s English was to trespass upon her property, really; to admit that even one’s thoughts belonged to her.)
And yet, Alice couldn’t help her humble self: “If you please, Your Majesty—”
“I—pleased?”
“I just want—”
“You want!”
Finding herself now in some sorely drifting boat, already leaking, on Alice rowed: “I wanted . . . just one moment—”
“You shameful girlish thing,” exclaimed the Queen, burying a multitude of chins in her goitered stole. “You hate the part that’s tiny still in you. And yet, you want to hide within the child in you.”
Not true, Alice thought, that royal color flushing through her, making one crimson of her flowering cheeks. Can’t we hate our refuge and still use it? “Hide? I don’t. I won’t.”
“You can’t, you mean,” the Queen declared. “You can no longer not know what we mean.”
But what did that mean?
Alice searched out her White Rabbit. There, he stood—swaying uncertain beneath those fretful ears—like some wavering palm at the end of her mind. No no answering look. No, not a word to defend her. He was scared, too scared.
With a lacquered flick of those fire-fangling fingertips, the Queen commanded; and that Royal Herald’s horn sounded again. And now, as Alice watched, the grandest marching band appeared. A faux-splendid card representing each and every splendiferous instrument—each shimmering tuba, saxophone, and flute, each trombone and clarinet. (On the back of each card, an advert: “Buy War Savings Bonds and Stamps.”)
Where is there an end of it, thought Alice “There is no end,” that drone seemed to answer.
Isn’t it a trial?
No child can stay a child.
Before Alice could lodge an objection, that courtly oblong throng, all those Knaves, Eights, Kings, and Threes, let out a groan, joining that trilling Queen. And the White Rabbit tooted his trumpet along with them.
Where, where an end? “Must you, really?” Alice tried.
But her words found no net on that wind. Oh no, the Queen and her unshuffled deck merely exulted, jubilant:
The story never told,
How Wonderland grows old.
Oh, isn’t it . . .
What if it never did end? What if this horrible jangling of everything sensible, of everything heartfelt, never relented? Sure, she had wished to stay here forever—with him. But not like this. Not with him toadying up. Not like this, in this unchanging goldenglare—with the baabaabaa blaa of the Tuba blaring on, and the tralala-ing of all the Queen’s men. As if Silence, and Alice, would soon be decapitated. Not like this, with that savage, sense-eating Queen sizing up Alice’s head for the block. Extending her savage hands for Alice’s neck.
CHAPTER XXI:
—
“FIRST THE SENTENCE, THEN THE VERDICT”
“CONSIDER, my dear,” mewled the King. “She is only a child.”
“And?” unmiffed, if unmoved, the Queen demanded.
“And the, uh, spectacle of such a pretty, headless child may well reflect ill on—”