Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

“Who?”

  “My dear,” the semi-congested King a-a-answered, “the song is near its end. You must applaud, you’ll need your hands for that.”

  “A little water wipes them clean.”

  “Come come, you’re you, my dear. Even Queens must curtsy to Courtesy.”

  Zwapp. With a rabid rip through the thankless air, the Queen drew back her hands—and abruptly turned left from Alice’s neck. Her ageless, lapidary eyes boring through that anointed King: “Lock it, Leonard. Or it’ll be your head.”

  And O! every mouth cried O! With a sudden falling sigh, as the royal song concluded, with a burst of rocketfire. All those ribbony stars melting gold green silver through the afternoon haze . . . And Her Majesty the Queen condescended to smile. To grace the huddled masses with a single celestial glance, as she clapped her serene, ceremonial hands. Like a portrait of savage benevolence.

  Whew.

  “A cat may look on a King,” or so the proverb went. Or that’s how Alice remembered it. But what happens when a King condescends to prowling, to mulishly meowing, like a common alley cat?

  Amid the corrugated crowd, at the foot of those royal stairs, still Alice stood. Watching as that sorry King trudge-clumped about, muttering “Buuuttt”—then followed that up with “Buuuttt whaaaat?” As if this latest trauma had reduced his syntax to dust. Had left him, superfluous, under his hollow crown.

  (Another bare, unaccommodated thing, shaking off fear of himself and his Queen. He who would lay himself down to sleep with grief, and then still wake and be King.)

  No surprise then, that this shell of a King gesticulated so tepidly. And still, with that gesture, a trumpet sounded royally. Immemorially. A trumpet of solitude, really.

  Seemingly startled by the sound, the White Rabbit, who’d sounded it (in his supporting role as Royal Herald), immediately unrolled a crumbling parchment scroll and read from it: “The High Court of Her Majesty Against the Heartless Alice.”

  No matter how little he’d intended it, no matter how briskly he’d proclaimed it, still it was he, hoisting that charge of “Heartless” like some scarlet flag, flapping on high.

  “Heartless?” Alice asked.

  No answer. Not a waver in his steely regard, in that Rabbit’s compulsive commitment to paying attention. As if, in taking on the role of Royal Herald, he’d somehow multiplied himself by himself. (If only she could get to the square root of him!) Oh but no, he merely enlarged on the royal charge: “For, Alice Has Committed Two Treasonous Offenses. Recklessly Rewriting the Tale to Suit Her Selfish Self. And, Breaking Rule Forty-Two—”

  At this, that fulminating Duchess pressed her prominent neck from the madding throng, to pin the outrage of aging on Alice: “You Have No Right to Grow Here!”

  No?

  Well-nigh convinced by the Duchess’s mere declaration, the bloodthirsty Queen and her bloodless King exchanged a rapier-like look and closed in on that Heartless Suspect, Alice. The Queen, with a snap of her thick-knuckled fingers, demanding to hear and know all: “Item.”

  The Rabbit, her Rabbit, all riled up. Wanting so much, with such a muchness, to reach The End: “Item,” he heralded, “she went reading, then proclaimed she’d dreamed us.”

  “Who did?” Alice challenged.

  “You did,” snapped the Queen.

  “And the Verdict is?” demanded the King.

  The Queen merely glared. Withering that Royal Sir with a single stare: “Pay attention when your Rabbit’s reading.” Then, to put a period, snapping her fractious fingers: “Item.”

  “Item,” the Rabbit came back, putting on a brazen front: “First she bragged she brought us here—”

  “Louder!” brayed the bellicose Queen.

  Louder: “First she bragged she brought us—”

  “Faster!” she demanded.

  Faster: “First she bragged she—”

  “Funnier!”

  “First sheeee—”

  “Guilty!”

  Alice sent forth a sigh: “Well, this certainly is a trial.”

  “And the Verdict is—” came the Pronouncement from the King.

  “First the Sentence, then the Verdict,” the Queen reprimanded (her logic impeccable as ever). Clearly, this Trial was too big a to-do to conclude so soon. “Item!”

  Alice bristled. “Why these items?”

  “Now, she wants to choose her items,” jeered the Dormouse.

  “Mad,” the Hatter came back. “She’s mad.”

  “I’m not!”

  “You’re here,” someone reasoned. The Cheshire Cat! Materializing like a painted wonder, over the King’s ermined shoulder. “They make us all mad here.”

  “Not me,” Alice declared.

  “Oh please,” the Dormouse squeaked.

  “You little tweeb,” the Hatter preened. Capering about, finding this a particularly fine time to stick up his hat, along with both sides of his hair.

  “Guilty!” the Queen declared (as if such a thing had never yet been declared). “Item!”

  “Item,” the Rabbit-Herald resumed, “she went chasing tail—”

  “But—” Alice tried.

  The Knave butted in: “Well, she certainly held my Hedgehog, and wriggled my Flamingo.”

  “Child, I never!” blustered the Royal Mum.

  In a rough stage whisper, Alice called to Alfred, “How can you bow to their madness? Why did you turn the page?”

  How formally, how sorrowfully he nodded. (As if some Herald of Sorrow reigned within that Herald of Heartlessness.) “That is the story, Alice. Time to close the book.”

  “But—” Alice began. But that “But” went nowhere, swallowed by some omnivorous “Shhhhhh!” sounding, seemingly, everywhere around her.

  And now, from every nook of the known, from every dark cranny, every undiscovered country, swarmed the most clamorous horde. (So many, Alice had not thought her book contained so many!) But there they were, everywhere: myriad wigged jurors with clipboard-like slates, lean solicitors (with their beneficent pet spiders); untold crowds of bespectacled spectators marking down each mistake, let alone each linguistic misstep, she made—and indeed had ever made. Numberless, their glares, redoubling until, it seemed, their insect-like, mirroring eyes would absorb the whole of her—and she would nothing be, but countless slightly differing images of some storybook thief.

  “Excuse me, but? . . .” Alice challenged the crowd.

  “Suppress her!” the Queen decreed. “Acting as if she were some mock me?”

  “A mockery!” the Mock Mock Turtle keened.

  “A royal Jabberwockery,” the Cheshire Cat deemed the entire proceeding.

  “She thought she was what was,” espoused the Knave.

  “Still does,” the Dormouse brayed.

  “The riddle?” riddled the Hatter. “She could barely even read it.”

  And with that most venomous charge—Illiteracy?—that swine-snouted Duchess brandished her spanking-truncheon: “Tit tot. You tart! You tit without a heart.”

  Knowing well, all too well, how to work the anxious cardboard crowd, that wizened creature shifted tone, winding her shelter blanket round her, letting the tears stand witness in her eyes. “She was my pig—I loved my pig!—and then she made me old and big.”

  “Indeed, she did,” concluded the Queen, sizing up the Duchess carefully.

  Dispassionately, the Duchess surveyed Her Majesty: “Well, I’m hardly the only thing she’s turned into an aging Queen.”

  With near-sweating labor, maintaining her posture of idle indifference, Her Majesty looked to the King for a word.

  “And the Verdict is?” demanded the doddering King.

  What a Queen, what a glare! With a bland, derisive toss of the chin, such as a sated jackal might cast, that Royal She turned and again condescended to bother Alice: “Now
, we shall decide if you can leave here.”

  Alice, taken aback: “Do you mean you’d keep me here?”

  “Someone write down ‘duh,’ and then add ‘praved,’” the Queen instructed. With a wicked cluck, drawing herself up, monumental as Space, “I mean, really. Every syllable she wastes—”

  “You age,” the Duchess jibed.

  “Off with your head!” the Queen ordained.

  A bright, alfresco applause rose through the air. And still the Duchess did not budge, nor did anyone lift a finger against her. Wearily, the Queen adjusted her crown, as if it were made of thorns. “I cannot exert myself with another word.”

  Turning mildly, she nipped again at that Kingly ear: “You tell her, dear.”

  He considered. “Well, then.” Clearing his throat, that castle-building King mused to Alice, “Every dream would love to hold its dreamer, it’s—”

  “—the dreamer who can’t bear to know she’s dreaming,” snapped the Queen. Impatiently.

  “But I’ll know!” Alice was adamant: “I know the dream—by heart. This is my heart. My dream.”

  The King eyed Alice cynically, mock-Socratically: “Oh, do you think? Then—”

  “—who and what are we?” quizzed the Queen.

  “Part of it,” replied Alice.

  “You think?” posed the Queen.

  “Then, where are we,” the King asked Alice, “when you’re not here? You think we just appear—”

  “—because you read us?” inveighed the Queen. Then, with a faltering whine, to the King: “I can’t. You deal with her.”

  Ever dutiful, the King nodded, his tristful eyes coming to bluer life as they settled once more on Alice. “The truth is, we are here, and sometimes—”

  “—we let you into our dream,” snipped the Queen.

  “I won’t believe you,” concluded Alice.

  The affronted Queen could not even fathom. “Do you think our dream needs you to dream it?”

  “You, who are no longer you?” quandaried the King.

  “You no one,” denounced the Queen.

  “I’m not no one.”

  “No one!”

  “No no,” cried Alice, pointing at every last Card and high-fantastical creature around her, “you, and you, and you are!”

  “No, we’re Us,” growled the illustrious, two-dimensional crowd.

  “You’re some mere you,” the Queen instructed.

  “We’re the book,” announced the book.

  “Your thoughts may come and go,” explained the King. “We’re here.”

  “And we’ll be here,” with inviolable voice the Queen made clear.

  “No changing us,” ta-da’d the Knave.

  “We’re the book.”

  Oh, are you? Alice thought. We’ll see about that.

  With a wave of her still half-dreaming hand, as if she were wielding some fairy wand, she summoned once again all those dusty dog-eared pages, the still-unbroken spine, the soul of her lost storybook. Once more she held it—held it out—for all those flabbergasted denizens of Wonderland.

  With a jolt, she could hear every thought in their stiff, swarming heads:

  “Well, I’m offended to my uttermost leaf.”

  “Unfeeling thing. Offering some ultimatum? To Us?”

  “We, the text she loved! We, who bore the imprint of her soul—and elbows—on us!”

  “We, the best illustration of how deep she is.”

  “Or was.”

  “We, who measured to the hour her solitude.”

  “We, who always gave so much, yielding more and more meaning the more she’d reread us.”

  “We, her unflagging support, when no one else was!”

  “And now, she’d just shut and shelve? She’d extinguish, Us?”

  “I mean, really. Does she think it’s a one-way street—when the words allow you such familiarity? Can you know a book without it knowing you by heart?”

  With those statements of the true dread every book feels—of being misread!—such a green chill settled over the trees, and a panting terror took hold of the painted lawn.

  One step ahead, with a pointedly unironical smile, Alice taunted them all: “You’re the book? Then, watch what happens when I close the book.”

  A sudden, frenetic squabbling broke forth—a railing, squalling, caterwauling:

  “Close?!”

  “The book?!”

  “No—please!”

  “Take my tea!” the Hatter cried.

  “My cream! It’s steamed!”

  Even the Duchess deigned to plead: “Precious Piggie!”

  But Alice dug her heels in: “Try and stop me.”

  As if she were casting, or breaking, a spell, she intoned those climactic words from the book, those which the Story-book Alice used to dispel her nightmarish Trial: “‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Alice loudly—”

  But her Dread Majesty interrupted, flinging open the hinges of her eyes, her pupils blistering like those fires at the end of time: “Guilty bitch! Suppress her! Get her head. Watch her shrink!”

  “Watch me shrink?” Alice parried. “I don’t think so. No. I’ve shrunk enough.”

  At those portentous words (soon to be struck from the Wonderland record) every eminent Juror and Jailer, every Judge, King, Queen, Knave, Duchess, and Tailor drew back in terror of Alice, whose body seemed now so vast as to trouble the sky. “You’re nothing,” she decreed. “Nothing but a pack of cards.”

  With that, Alice clapped her hands, slamming shut her book: wwwwwwwhhhhooooooooosshhhhhhhhhhh.

  And gone gone, at once, they were. All gone. Not a sight, not a sound. Not a card floating down from the clouds (as described in her book). Only some blank prismatic light upon those solitary fields . . .

  Ta-ta. Good night. Good night.

  But . . . her Royal Herald?

  Alice cast about—all about. She searched the furthest tree, each slope . . . No White Rabbit there, no Alfred to be found.

  Oh no no no! What had she done? Had she been so swept up, so mastered by the brute blood of the Trial, that she’d let herself neglect . . . that she’d . . . let?

  “White Rabbit!” she cried. But not a thump. Not a sound. Oh nonononono.

  And now, Alice’s doubt rebounded on itself. Had she, in fact, used the Trial? Seized on it as a distraction, as a detour from some dark wood just ahead?

  For, look what she’d done. Had run all the wonder out of Wonderland, that’s what.

  Perhaps the Queen had been right, then. In the end, she was no one. And therefore, had no one left. She, with a soul that was not a soul. Lodged in a room in which it never had fit. (Then again, how could it ever have fit—with just how little food and water she ever had given it?) She, and her empty mind, like some skull without eyes, scanning a book without print.

  “Cheshire Puss!” she called out. “Cheshire . . . Puss? . . .”

  Not a purr answered. Not a word.

  But perhaps that was best. Better to be left on her own, with this no-one self. No longer tracking what page she was on, no longer counting how much or how little was left, with each page she turned, with each look she cast.

  “Alfred?!”

  No one there.

  What now, what next? No answering that.

  There she stood. On a blank Court Room Lawn, on a nonexistent page. Marooned.

  CHAPTER XXII:

  —

  NO MOMENT OF FAREWELL

  NOTHING left then. Where only moments ago had stood that imperial throng, now Alice stood alone. The majestical pageant faded—with all such stuff as her wonder had been made on. Gone. And she? Transported, somehow, somewhere else? (For, in a trice everything felt else.) Or was it just that some new locale was filling in around her? Like some fresh, lonesome background
in the painting that contained her. Here, where now she stood. On some solitary riverbed in Wonderland. Some random stubble-plains, surrounding. All her fluttering pages gone—all those formidable cards, the maddest of Hatters, her Mock and Mock Turtles, her Duchess, King, and Queen. All ghostly, gone.

  Nothing for it, thought Alice, but to wonder at the absence. To stand and stare in blankness at the still-blank sky; to wonder how the Wonderland sun held up, and why it brought no pain now to her eyes. How did that golden reef of cloud drift so goldenly on—for mindless hours, it seemed—all the infinite cumulous riches within one narrow room . . .

  Somewhere she’d read, she was sure she had, something so strange about the sun. (Though why she should be thinking about some heavenly body right now, she couldn’t quite figure out. Nor why, at such a time, she should be playing this game of hide-and-seek with her mind . . .) Still. What had it said exactly? That the sun, which was made out of light, could never quite look away from the light. So satisfied was it to be in the light, that it was content just to look and be looked on by it.

  And the upshot of that? That nothing ever interrupted its view. That it was continuous. And thus, it never departed from itself—never found itself distracted; never paused to doubt itself; never felt other than. It simply was; and all it had seen and done remained part of it. So, nothing ever was lost. Nothing would ever be gone. What it remembered still was—and was always there.

  Then, why was it that she, unlike the sun, could not stop herself looking back? To all those times Alfred and she would run behind their houses, within their common garden; all those afternoons, when he’d come again to play; when he’d leave her, by the end of day, with so many fresh things to ask of him. So many parts of him still to uncover. Still to desire. As if each new sun bred from her love a new love . . .

  . . . The Giraffe House, Regent’s Park, that first, sunfreckled April afternoon. So long ago. Alfred and she, aged six—or seven, were they? Together, standing in a wondering silence. His child hand extended toward the fine, sloping neck of their long-standing favorite giraffe.

  “Alice, see!” he exulted, reeling right round. His loose fraying sleeve asway on the breeze. “Our giraffe—his tongue is utterly black. Black as the spots on his back. It’s to keep it from getting sunburnt.”