“. . . one of whom is responsible for your present state.”
“Proof she was what they said she was! If she’d been a parlor maid or a pastry cook she could’ve cursed me ’til she was blue in the face but it wouldn’t’ve made me what I am, would it?”
The man raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You know what I think about that. Remember, had the late lamented Queen been innocent, she’d not have been singled out for my . . . attentions.”
“Two strokes,” the creature huffed indignantly.
“No more talk of that,” said the man.
“Besides, nobody’s innocent in this country. You so much look at the Queen cross-eyed and she goes into hissy-fits. Next thing you know, your head’s doin’ double-service as a croquet ball.”
The man looked down at the creature and spoke in a whisper. “Be careful what you say. You know she has spies. Remember the haberdasher.”
The creature’s eyes flashed guiltily toward the door. “What more can she do to me?” he rasped quietly. Though she had developed a passionate predisposition toward decapitation, the Queen’s imagination had never failed of innovation, and was not an organ one would wish to tempt.
“You remember the baker’s head? Just rollin’ to a rest there on the ground, lookin’ up at the sky when a pigeon drops whitewash on his face! Ha! Ha!” The creature was convulsed with perverse laughter. “Talk about addin’ insult to injury!”
The paroxysm of laughter that followed seized the man, too, even as he objected, between sobs, that it wasn’t funny.
“‘Course it is!” the creature protested. “The whole bloody thing’s hysterical. I mean, look at us. I’m no more than an aborigine’s nightmare, who no one but you can see,” the last portion of the statement was underscored with accusatory emphasis, as if the creature’s condition was the man’s fault, which it wasn’t, “and you’re done up like a dog’s dinner in that outfit. You get no exercise . . .”
“I do—” the man began to protest, but the creature interrupted.
“You don’t burn calories loppin’ folk’s heads off. You need repetitive motion.”
“Two strokes,” said the man with an ironical smirk.
“That’s tasteless,” scolded the creature, a grin creeping to the left corner of his mouth. “Besides, that brand of exercise takes no more muscle or brains than golf, which takes none, and if the Queen told you to stick a needle in your eye you’d say ‘How deep?’ Now is that the kind of man your daddy thought you’d grow up to be?”
“And yours?” said the man meaningfully.
The creature hung its head and a large, green tear seeped from the corner of its eye. “That’s not nice.”
The man repented of his comment. It had been cruel. “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching down to pat the creature on its shoulder. His gaze, returning to the window, became stoic. “We are what we are,” he said. “And we’ve nothing to do but make the best of it.”
The creature rested its nose on the windowsill. “I wouldn’t mind so much, if only folks could see me. If not for you, I’d begin to wonder if I even exist at all.”
“Of course you exist. You’re certainly not a figment of my imagination!” He refrained from saying that his imagination had better things to do than conceive such a grotesque abstraction, but he thought it. He did brief battle with the more troubling possibility that he might be mad and that the creature wasn’t really there after all. Why could no one else see it?
“Do you suppose that’s true?” said the creature with a sniff that left a wet trail on the window ledge.
“What, that you’re not a figment of my imagination?”
“No, that part about being what we are and not able to change.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t see how we could. Seems to me the processes that make us what we are don’t lend themselves to improvisation.”
“What about spells?”
“What about them?”
“Well, a spell made me what I am. Why can’t another spell undo it? Didn’t you ever read Sleeping Beauty?”
“A fairy tale,” said the man. “It wasn’t the spell that made you what you are. It was . . . something scientific. Something explainable to the rational brain.”
“We shall have to find one and enquire of it. What sort of explanation, just as a for instance?”
The man had committed countless hours to Manfred’s situation. Nearly as many as to his own. But, despite the fact that a reasonable explanation eluded him, he held steadfastly to the conviction that, with a little more evidence, it could be explained. Granted, a concatenation of circumstances—whether geological, topological, psychological, or hydraulic—that could render a robust Englishman of Welsh extraction not only invisible but gnomish as well, was difficult to conceive, let alone embrace on a purely scientific level. “Any number of things,” said the man, stalling for time. Then a thought occurred to him. “Take disease, for instance. There are all manner of curious maladies making themselves evident these days. Yours is probably of tropical derivation. It could be as simple as that.”
“And just happened to strike me when that witch pointed her finger at me and said:
‘O Thou base and wretched one
Shalt what thou art, in flesh become
Invisible to mortal eye
And so the world will pass you by
But for the headsman, only he
Shall know what manner beast ye be.”
“Coincidence,” said the man.
The creature snuffled dubiously. “I think not. Those witches know their stuff. And you’ve got to admire ’em. Can’t be easy to come up with decent poetry when you’re on fire.”
The man turned this praise aside. “The cadence is poor,” he said. “And the rhyme suspect.”
“She was under duress,” the creature defended.
The speculation between them was ancient and turned up nothing new. “One cannot battle superstition with reason,” the man said. “If you choose to drape the windows of your intellect with these dark and inexplicable fancies, I can’t prevent it.”
In the interval, three individuals had clustered about a rose bush on the lawn, and were busily—and not too carefully—painting its white roses red.
“What do you suppose they’re up to?” the man wondered aloud.
The creature followed the man’s gaze with his own. “Who knows? Whatever it is, I bet they’re doing it to keep you-know-who from lopping off their heads. She’s mad with it, I tell you.”
“Shh!” said the man, holding a finger to his lips. “You’d think anyone as sensitive to the prospect as you are would be a little more judicious with their comments.”
“Fah!” said the creature, emphasizing the first and last syllable, “if she wants my head, she can have it.” Once again he removed the article in question and held it up as high as he could reach, which allowed him a better view of the lawn and the river. “It’s too full of botherin’ ideas to let me sleep anyway.” He shook his head so that his eyes bounced in all directions.
“You’re going to give yourself a headache,” the man cautioned.
The creature’s eyes settled and were cast over by melancholy. “Things like this never happened in England.”
“No,” the man agreed wistfully. “Still, one must adapt.”
They watched from the window for a moment in companionable silence as the men about the rosebush engaged in a dispute with the cat in the tree. It was a decidedly one-sided dispute as the cat, for his part, only grinned.
The creature waxed poetical at the sight.
“I think that I shall never see
A thing as lovely as a cat up a tree
O what fools these mortals be
Out to old Aunt Mary’s”
“You are flirting with several independently held copyrights,” said the man, though his mind wasn’t really behind it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
“Public domain,” the creature said. It returned to the stool and resume
d writing. “I’m going to put it all down.”
“All what?”
“All these things we see from our window. White rabbits and playing cards and cats in the tree. I shall make a story of it, into which I shall incorporate a moral lesson for readers young and old.”
The man snorted. “A decent story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All this is . . . middle. And muddled middle at that. There is no story.”
“But for the new ingredient,” said the creature.
“What new ingredient?”
“The white rabbit and the little girl. I shall call her Penelope.” He began writing. “Penelope and the White Rabbit.”
“Doesn’t have a ring to it.” The man looked inspirationally at the ceiling. “I doubt a focus group would give it the nod.”
“I suppose you could do better?”
“I suppose I could,” said the man. “Penelope is too old-fashioned a name. You want something the market can get its teeth into. I know! Leave the little girl, just ‘Little Girl’ and name the rabbit.”
The creature was willing to accept editorial modification, within reason. Loudly scratching out the previous title he began his first revision. “The Little Girl and . . . and . . .”
“Wilberforce!” said the man, as if struck by a thunderbolt. “Wilberforce the Rabbit!”
“The Little Girl and Wilberforce the White Rabbit,” the creature amended, feeling that the insertion of the adjective entitled him to ownership.
There was a knock at the door, but the knocker, wasting no time with social niceties, burst in. It was the King of Hearts. His crown was lop-sided, for he had been running as much from his wife as to fetch her executioner.
“Come quickly,” said the King, out of breath. “Your services are required.”
The man strode to the bureau and unlocked the little wooden box, from which he removed his executioner’s hood. “Who is it this time?” he said wearily.
“Some blasted cat up a tree had the sauce to invigorate her ire,” the King explained. “Thing showed up as just a head. Oddest thing you ever saw.”
“I doubt that,” said the man, with a sidelong glance at the creature, whom only he could see. “I doubt that very much.”
The King ran off in a fluster. The man fetched his ax from behind the door and, before he left the room, made the creature a promise. “One stroke this time.”
“That would be most kind,” said the creature, preoccupied with his narrative. “This title’s not settling with me, though. I can’t see it becoming an animated feature. How about . . .”
The executioner closed the door and left the creature alone to wrestle its literary demons. After all, decapitating a cat that was only a head would require considerable precision.
Cummings knew nothing of what Rat Badger was experiencing on his nightly forays into the unstructured demesne of other-being. He may infer, from such simple evidence as the appearance on the nightstand of an unabridged edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that the journey was to be a fantastical one but, from room to room, night to night, these clues were as new and unexpected to him as they were to his guest. His was an ancillary role. The rooms themselves were no more of his design than those of the privileged classes among whom he had served early in his career in England. Yet, his was not to question, but simply to perform to the best of his abilities those tasks and chores that made themselves evident in the course of the day, and to make his guests as comfortable as the situation allowed.
A butler’s sacred duty is to serve his master. To do this effectively, he must anticipate the master’s needs and desires, so that the book he requires is not only at hand when he reaches for it, but opened to the correct page; that the cigar has not merely been kept in its humidor for the appropriate length of time, under ideal climactic conditions, but that it is exactly nipped and lighted so that the master is drawing upon it before he realizes he’s smoking. The best butlers—those at the very apogee of the profession—know, after long years of practice, the subtle nuances foreshadowing a whim or fancy and so anticipate them in a way that is almost alchemical.
In the early years of his employment on the island, therefore, Cummings had found the absence of a master—at least one discernible to the senses and therefore of discoverable preferences—unsettling. Left to his own devices he felt himself, at first, unequal to the challenge when a guest would explode, or go insane, or disappear altogether. Most turned into statuary on the lawn, reminders, he felt with a poignant ache in his butlery heart, of failure on his part. The passage of time, however, when it wasn’t busy healing all wounds and mending broken hearts, had mitigated this sensation. He had come to realize that each guest was ultimately responsible not only for the content, composition, and character of the rooms he or she inhabited or the experiences they encountered therein, but for the consequences thereof.
Inwardly, however, in the neatly starched, pressed, and pleated precincts of his soul, he was cheering for Harold Erasmus Jackson. The young man of African extraction had surpassed his expectations. Morning after morning he had discovered the individual under review not only sentient, but, after a fashion, illuminated. Previous guests, whom he had adjudged of sterner stock had, in one way or another, withered like earthworms on hot pavement. Not Harold.
This said, it was nevertheless with a keen sense of trepidation that Cummings approached the room each morning. One never knew what to expect. Everyone has their limits. Had Badger encountered his the previous night, there would be nothing left but the clean up.
The hinges of the door as it opened squeaked out the start-up tones of Windows 43, though he had no way of knowing this. His technological awareness was of another era. He was surprised to find the Occupant not in bed, but standing by the window, staring at his reflection in the business end of a highly polished headsman’s ax.
“Good morning, Cummings,” said Rat.
“Good morning, sir. I am pleased to see you up and about.” He placed his silver salver upon a small round table in the corner. “Breakfast, sir. Kippers, a coconut omelet, and sautéed bananas.”
Rat was only half listening. His thoughts were centered upon his reflection in the ax head. Cummings knew this and, however much he wished to inquire, refrained from comment.
“People can change, can’t they?” said Rat at length.
“Change, sir? Are you desirous of a different pair of pajamas?”
Rat looked up. “Not that kind of change. I mean . . . a change in the kind of person they are. Inside.” He tapped his chest in the approximate location of his heart.
“Oh, I see, sir,” said Cummings. “Yes, sir. I believe they can. In fact, this seems to be the purpose of this . . . exercise upon the island.”
“It works? People do change while they’re here?”
“Each instance is unique, sir. Some do. Some don’t. Inwardly, that is. All our visitors change ultimately . . . into something.”
“You’re losing me.”
Cummings sniffed, ever so slightly. “The guava juice is particularly piquant this morning, sir.” He offered the libation in question to Rat upon a tiny silver tray all its own. Rat quaffed the beverage in a nonce; as to its piquantness he made no remark. His thoughts were less on his palette than upon the condition of his soul, to whose representation in the ax head he returned his attention.
“It’s better this morning,” he said.
“This is heartening news, sir,” said Cummings. “You must be encouraged.”
Rat shrugged. “I don’t know. It ain’t exactly improvin’ by leaps and bounds, as the headsman’s gnome would say, but if you take little strokes as a whole, yeah. The picture is improving.”
The image, which had become quite independent of late, was writing indecipherable equations upon the palm of its hand. Its demeanor was intense. Focused; concentrated in a manner that made its efforts seem of great import. In the reflection of the room behind it was a nest of wires, cables, modems, and other implements of te
chnological interconnectivity.
Next thing of which he was aware, Rat was on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Cummings’ head hovered feudally at the edge of the frame. “Comfortable, sir?”
Rat was getting drowsy. “Been a long day, has it?”
“The observation, though not original, sir, is appropriate. It has been a long day.”
“Made a fool of myself, I suppose.”
“As to that sir, you may take comfort in the fact that there was no witness but me.”
Rat nodded. “What kind of person do you think I’ll be when this is all over . . . assuming I survive.”
“A changed one, sir,” said Cummings, fluffing the duvet.
The answer sufficed for the moment. “What do you suppose happened to all those people on my plane?”
Cummings knew he wasn’t referring to the obvious, which was that they had drowned. “Do you mean their spirits, sir?”
“Yes, Cummings. Their numen. Their souls. Their incorporeal essences, as you so astutely remarked early in our relationship. What became of ’em?”
“I am not in possession of that information, sir. Theologians and philosophers . . .”
“Differ in their opinions. I know. I know,” said Rat. There followed a contemplative intermission, during which Cummings tidied the room.
It was at this juncture that Rat became aware of the wallpaper with its little pink flowers, intersprinkled with cavorting mice of unnatural hues. Of the brightly colored paper dragon suspended from strings in the corner. Of the rice paper walls. Of the rails on his crib. Of the round mirror, bordered with Disney creatures, on the white bamboo dresser immediately across from him in which, in place of his reflection, was that of a female infant of Asian persuasion.
“I wish I could change what happened,” said Rat at last, his voice high, childish, and Asiatic. “All those people.”
“Would that one could sift one’s fingers through the past
And alter that which was from first to last
Storyteller Page 17
