Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

  Virginia Boote was an eminently practical woman. She said, “Suppose we did want to eat Suntown Sunbird. Where should we start looking for it?”

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle scratched the bristling seventh-day beard that was sprouting on his chin (it never grew any longer than that; seventh-day beards never do). “If it was me,” he told them, “I’d head down to Suntown of a noon in midsummer, and I’d find somewhere comfortable to sit—Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse, for example—and I’d wait for the Sunbird to come by. Then I’d catch him in the traditional manner, and cook him in the traditional manner as well.”

  “And what would the traditional manner of catching him be?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “Why, the same way your famous ancestor poached quails and wood grouse,” said Crawcrustle.

  “There’s nothing in Casanova’s memoirs about poaching quail,” said Jackie Newhouse.

  “Your ancestor was a busy man,” said Crawcrustle. “He couldn’t be expected to write everything down. But he poached a good quail nonetheless.”

  “Dried corn and dried blueberries, soaked in whiskey,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “That’s how my folk always did it.”

  “And that was how Casanova did it,” said Crawcrustle, “although he used barley grains mixed with raisins, and he soaked the raisins in brandy. He taught me himself.”

  Jackie Newhouse ignored this statement. It was easy to ignore much that Zebediah T. Crawcrustle said. Instead, Jackie Newhouse asked, “And where is Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse in Suntown?”

  “Why, where it always is, third lane after the old market in the Suntown district, just before you reach the old drainage ditch that was once an irrigation canal, and if you find yourself outside One eye Khayam’s carpet shop you have gone too far,” began Crawcrustle. “But I see by the expressions of irritation upon your faces that you were expecting a less succinct, less accurate description. Very well. It is in Suntown, and Suntown is in Cairo, in Egypt, where it always is, or almost always.”

  “And who will pay for an expedition to Suntown?” asked Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “And who will be on this expedition? I ask the question although I already know the answer, and I do not like it.”

  “Why, you will pay for it, Augustus, and we will all come,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “You can deduct it from our Epicurean membership dues. And I shall bring my chef’s apron and my cooking utensils.”

  Augustus knew that Crawcrustle had not paid his Epicurean Club membership in much too long a time, but the Epicurean Club would cover him; Crawcrustle had been a member of the Epicureans in Augustus’s father’s day. He simply said, “And when shall we leave?”

  Crawcrustle fixed him with a mad old eye and shook his head in disappointment. “Why, Augustus,” he said. “We’re going to Suntown, to catch the Sunbird. When else should we leave?”

  “Sunday!” sang Virginia Boote. “Darlings, we’ll leave on a Sunday!”

  “There’s hope for you yet, young lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “We shall leave Sunday indeed. Three Sundays from now. And we shall travel to Egypt. We shall spend several days hunting and trapping the elusive Sunbird of Suntown, and, finally, we shall deal with it in the traditional way.”

  Professor Mandalay blinked a small gray blink. “But,” he said. “I am teaching a class on Monday. On Mondays I teach mythology, on Tuesdays I teach tap dancing, and on Wednesdays, woodwork.”

  “Get a teaching assistant to take your course, Mandalay O Mandalay. On Monday you’ll be hunting the Sunbird,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “And how many other professors can say that?”

  They went, one by one, to see Crawcrustle, in order to discuss the journey ahead of them, and to announce their misgivings.

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle was a man of no fixed abode. Still, there were places he could be found, if you were of a mind to find him. In the early mornings he slept in the bus terminal, where the benches were comfortable and the transport police were inclined to let him lie; in the heat of the afternoons he hung in the park by the statues of long-forgotten generals, with the dipsos and the winos and the hopheads, sharing their company and the contents of their bottles, and offering his opinion, which was, as that of an Epicurean, always considered and always respected, if not always welcomed.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sought out Crawcrustle in the park; he had with him his daughter, Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. She was small, but she was sharp as a shark’s tooth.

  “You know,” said Augustus, “there is something very familiar about this.”

  “About what?” asked Zebediah.

  “All of this. The expedition to Egypt. The Sunbird. It seemed to me like I heard about it before.”

  Crawcrustle merely nodded. He was crunching something from a brown paper bag.

  Augustus said, “I went to the bound annals of the Epicurean Club, and I looked it up. And there was what I took to be a reference to the Sunbird in the index for forty years ago, but I was unable to learn anything more.”

  “And why was that?” asked Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, swallowing noisily.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sighed. “I found the relevant page in the annals,” he said, “but it was burned away, and afterward there was some great confusion in the administration of the Epicurean Club.”

  “You’re eating lightning bugs from a paper bag,” said Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. “I seen you doing it.”

  “I am indeed, little lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

  “Do you remember the days of great confusion, Crawcrustle?” asked Augustus.

  “I do indeed,” said Crawcrustle. “And I remember you. You were only the age that young Hollyberry is now. But there is always confusion, Augustus, and then there is no confusion. It is like the rising and the setting of the sun.”

  Jackie Newhouse and Professor Mandalay found Crawcrustle that evening, behind the railroad tracks. He was roasting something in a tin can over a small charcoal fire.

  “What are you roasting, Crawcrustle?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “More charcoal,” said Crawcrustle. “Cleans the blood, purifies the spirit.”

  There was basswood and hickory, cut up into little chunks at the bottom of the can, all black and smoking.

  “And will you actually eat this charcoal, Crawcrustle?” asked Professor Mandalay.

  In response, Crawcrustle licked his fingers and picked out a lump of charcoal from the can. It hissed and fizzed in his grip.

  “A fine trick,” said Professor Mandalay. “That’s how fire-eaters do it, I believe.”

  Crawcrustle popped the charcoal into his mouth and crunched it between his ragged old teeth. “It is indeed,” he said. “It is indeed.”

  Jackie Newhouse cleared his throat. “The truth of the matter is,” he said, “Professor Mandalay and I have deep misgivings about the journey that lies ahead.”

  Zebediah merely crunched his charcoal. “Not hot enough,” he said. He took a stick from the fire and nibbled off the orange-hot tip of it. “That’s good,” he said.

  “It’s all an illusion,” said Jackie Newhouse.

  “Nothing of the sort,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, primly. “It’s prickly elm.”

  “I have extreme misgivings about all this,” said Jackie Newhouse. “My ancestors and I have a finely tuned sense of personal preservation, one that has often left us shivering on roofs and hiding in rivers—one step away from the law, or from gentlemen with guns and legitimate grievances—and that sense of self-preservation is telling me not to go to Suntown with you.”

  “I am an academic,” said Professor Mandalay, “and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things. Still, I find the whole thing remarkably suspicious. If this Sunbird is so tasty, why have I not heard of it?”

  “You have, Mandy old fruit. You have,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

  “And I am, i
n addition, an expert on geographical features from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Timbuktu,” continued Professor Mandalay. “Yet I have never seen a mention in any book of a place called Suntown in Cairo.”

  “Seen it mentioned? Why, you’ve taught it,” said Crawcrustle, and he doused a lump of smoking charcoal with hot pepper sauce before popping it in his mouth and chomping it down.

  “I don’t believe you’re really eating that,” said Jackie Newhouse. “But even being around the trick of it is making me uncomfortable. I think it is time that I was elsewhere.”

  And he left. Perhaps Professor Mandalay left with him: that man was so gray and so ghostie it was always a toss-up whether he was there or not.

  Virginia Boote tripped over Zebediah T. Crawcrustle while he rested in her doorway, in the small hours of the morning. She was returning from a restaurant she had needed to review. She got out of a taxi, tripped over Crawcrustle, and went sprawling. She landed nearby. “Whee!” she said. “That was some trip, wasn’t it?”

  “Indeed it was, Virginia,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “You would not happen to have such a thing as a box of matches on you, would you?”

  “I have a book of matches on me somewhere,” she said, and she began to rummage in her purse, which was very large and very brown. “Here you are.”

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle was carrying a bottle of purple methylated spirits, which he proceeded to pour into a plastic cup.

  “Meths?” said Virginia Boote. “Somehow you never struck me as a meths drinker, Zebby.”

  “Nor am I,” said Crawcrustle. “Foul stuff. It rots the guts and spoils the taste buds. But I could not find any lighter fluid at this time of night.”

  He lit a match, then dipped it near the surface of the cup of spirits, which began to burn with a flickery light. He ate the match. Then he gargled with the flaming liquid, and blew a sheet of flame into the street, incinerating a sheet of newspaper as it blew by.

  “Crusty,” said Virginia Boote, “that’s a good way to get yourself killed.”

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle grinned through black teeth. “I don’t actually drink it,” he told her. “I just gargle and breathe it out.”

  “You’re playing with fire,” she warned him.

  “That’s how I know I’m alive,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

  Virginia said, “Oh, Zeb. I am excited. I am so excited. What do you think the Sunbird tastes like?”

  “Richer than quail and moister than turkey, fatter than ostrich and lusher than duck,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Once eaten it’s never forgotten.”

  “We’re going to Egypt,” she said. “I’ve never been to Egypt.” Then she said, “Do you have anywhere to stay the night?”

  He coughed, a small cough that rattled around in his old chest. “I’m getting too old to sleep in doorways and gutters,” he said. “Still, I have my pride.”

  “Well,” she said, looking at the man, “you could sleep on my sofa.”

  “It is not that I am not grateful for the offer,” he said, “but there is a bench in the bus station that has my name on it.”

  And he pushed himself away from the wall and tottered majestically down the street.

  There really was a bench in the bus station that had his name on it. He had donated the bench to the bus station back when he was flush, and his name was attached to the back of it, engraved upon a small brass plaque. Zebediah T. Crawcrustle was not always poor. Sometimes he was rich, but he had difficulty in holding on to his wealth, and whenever he had become wealthy he discovered that the world frowned on rich men eating in hobo jungles at the back of the railroad, or consorting with the winos in the park, so he would fritter his wealth away as best he could. There were always little bits of it here and there that he had forgotten about, and sometimes he would forget that he did not like being rich, and then he would set out again and seek his fortune, and find it.

  He had needed a shave for a week, and the hairs of his seven-day beard were starting to come through snow white.

  They left for Egypt on a Sunday, the Epicureans. There were five of them there, and Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy waved good-bye to them at the airport. It was a very small airport, which still permitted waves good-bye.

  “Good-bye, Father!” called Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy waved back at her as they walked along the asphalt to the little prop plane, which would begin the first leg of their journey.

  “It seems to me,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, “that I remember, albeit dimly, a day like this long, long ago. I was a small boy, in that memory, waving good-bye. I believe it was the last time I saw my father, and I am struck once more with a sudden presentiment of doom.” He waved one last time at the small child at the other end of the field, and she waved back at him.

  “You waved just as enthusiastically back then,” agreed Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, “but I think she waves with slightly more aplomb.”

  It was true. She did.

  They took a small plane and then a larger plane, then a smaller plane, a blimp, a gondola, a train, a hot-air balloon, and a rented Jeep.

  They rattled through Cairo in the Jeep. They passed the old market, and they turned off on the third lane they came to (if they had continued on they would have come to a drainage ditch that was once an irrigation canal). Mustapha Stroheim himself was sitting outside in the street, perched on an elderly wicker chair. All of the tables and chairs were on the side of the street, and it was not a particularly wide street.

  “Welcome, my friends, to my Kahwa,” said Mustapha Stroheim. “Kahwa is Egyptian for café, or for coffeehouse. Would you like tea? Or a game of dominoes?”

  “We would like to be shown to our rooms,” said Jackie Newhouse.

  “Not me,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “I’ll sleep in the street. It’s warm enough, and that doorstep over there looks mighty comfortable.”

  “I’ll have coffee, please,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have water?” asked Professor Mandalay.

  “Who said that?” said Mustapha Stroheim. “Oh, it was you, little gray man. My mistake. When I first saw you I thought you were someone’s shadow.”

  “I will have ShaySokkar Bosta,” said Virginia Boote, which is a glass of hot tea with the sugar on the side. “And I will play backgammon with anyone who wishes to take me on. There’s not a soul in Cairo I cannot beat at backgammon, if I can remember the rules.”

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy was shown to his room. Professor Mandalay was shown to his room. Jackie Newhouse was shown to his room. This was not a lengthy procedure; they were all in the same room, after all. There was another room in the back where Virginia would sleep, and a third room for Mustapha Stroheim and his family.

  “What’s that you’re writing?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “It’s the procedures, annals, and minutes of the Epicurean Club,” said Professor Mandalay. He was writing in a large leather-bound book with a small black pen. “I have chronicled our journey here, and all the things that we have eaten on the way. I shall keep writing as we eat the Sunbird, to record for posterity all the tastes and textures, all the smells and the juices.”

  “Did Crawcrustle say how he was going to cook the Sunbird?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “He did,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “He says that he will drain a beer can, so it is only a third full. And then he will add herbs and spices to the beer can. He will stand the bird up on the can, with the can in its inner cavity, and place it up on the barbecue to roast. He says it is the traditional way.”

  Jackie Newhouse sniffed. “It sounds suspiciously modern to me.”

  “Crawcrustle says it is the traditional method of cooking the Sunbird,” repeated Augustus.

  “Indeed I did,” said Crawcrustle, coming up the stairs. It was a small building. The stairs weren’t that far away, and the walls were not thick ones. “The oldest beer in the world
is Egyptian beer, and they’ve been cooking the Sunbird with it for over five thousand years now.”

  “But the beer can is a relatively modern invention,” said Professor Mandalay, as Zebediah T. Crawcrustle came through the door. Crawcrustle was holding a cup of Turkish coffee, black as tar, which steamed like a kettle and bubbled like a tarpit.

  “That coffee looks pretty hot,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy.

  Crawcrustle knocked back the cup, draining half the contents. “Nah,” he said. “Not really. And the beer can isn’t really that new an invention. We used to make them out of an amalgam of copper and tin in the old days, sometimes with a little silver in there, sometimes not. It depended on the smith, and what he had to hand. You needed something that would stand up to the heat. I see that you are all looking at me doubtfully. Gentlemen, consider: of course the Ancient Egyptians made beer cans; where else would they have kept their beer?”

  From outside the window, at the tables in the street, came a wailing, in many voices. Virginia Boote had persuaded the locals to start playing backgammon for money, and she was cleaning them out. That woman was a backgammon shark.

  Out back of Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse there was a courtyard containing a broken-down old barbecue, made of clay bricks and a half-melted metal grating, and an old wooden table. Crawcrustle spent the next day rebuilding the barbecue and cleaning it, oiling down the metal grille.

  “That doesn’t look like it’s been used in forty years,” said Virginia Boote. Nobody would play backgammon with her any longer, and her purse bulged with grubby piasters.

  “Something like that,” said Crawcrustle. “Maybe a little more. Here, Ginnie, make yourself useful. I’ve written a list of things I need from the market. It’s mostly herbs and spices and wood chips. You can take one of the children of Mustapha Stroheim to translate for you.”

  “My pleasure, Crusty.”

  The other three members of the Epicurean Club were occupying themselves in their own ways. Jackie Newhouse was making friends with many of the people of the area, who were attracted by his elegant suits and his skill at playing the violin. Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy went for long walks. Professor Mandalay spent time translating the hieroglyphics he had noticed were incised upon the clay bricks in the barbecue. He said that a foolish man might believe that they proved the barbecue in Mustapha Stroheim’s backyard was once sacred to the Sun. “But I, who am an intelligent man,” he said, “I see immediately that what has happened is that bricks that were once, long ago, part of a temple, have, over the millennia, been reused. I doubt that these people know the value of what they have here.”