by Mark Helprin
“Fredericka! Fredericka!” he screamed as he swam to her languid parachute. She didn’t answer. He dived down and sought her from underneath. He could see virtually nothing. Nor could he feel her body. There he stayed, embracing the filthy mud, pulling the lines with his hands, swallowing the poisonous water until he had no more breath and had to surface.
Again he was trapped. This time he was so out of breath that he thought he would never get free. Again, though with less energy, he tore at the parachute with his teeth. It went slowly, but he made a hole big enough to get his head through, and then, after breathing, he enlarged the opening and swam out of the confines that he was sure had taken his wife.
Treading water, heart pounding, he began to weep. Perhaps she had lost and never regained consciousness. Otherwise, it would have been too terrible a way to die. The water stank of mud and chemicals, and was covered with an oil slick. Oh, how horrible, he thought, and his fault entirely to have allowed it. If he had simply refused instead of letting himself be backed into what was really not even a corner, she might yet be alive. Had it not been for his weakness and indecision, they might have had a simple life together, and though he had no idea why, he was sure that in a simple life he would have learned to love her.
For the next half hour he grimly sought her body, diving down to no avail, swallowing more and more water, bathing his bleeding wounds in the sewer-tainted swamp. Finally, unable to find her, he swam to the bank in misery and defeat. He was too tired even to climb out, and simply lay on the mud, his face resting upon a pile of muskrat scat.
And then he heard a voice, and the voice said, “What are you doing there? It’s so boring, watching you swim around in that disgusting water. Can we go now?”
“Fredericka!” he shouted. “Fredericka!” He flopped toward her and threw his arms around her mud-coated shoulders.
“Get away, Freddy. Your face is covered with muskrat shit.”
He drew back.
“Wipe it off in the water.”
“How do you know it’s from a muskrat?” he asked.
She tightened in disgust. “I saw it. I saw it doing it,” she said.
“That’s all well and good, but how did you know it was a muskrat?”
“I’ve read a book about muskrats.”
“You have?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“On our honeymoon, when you left to help Phoebe Boylingehotte move, I read a book about muskrats. Your father gave it to me because, at the time, he pitied me. It was the last time he pitied me. Now he hates me. He thinks I’m an idiot, and I suppose I am. I was so happy that he gave me the book, because I thought that after I’d read it we could have long conversations about muskrats, but he’s not a bit interested in muskrats. It’s just a pose. And what’s more, he hadn’t even read The Complete Book of British Muskrats.”
“I read it,” said Freddy. “It was remarkably well balanced. Most books about muskrats have a bias.”
“Yes, I loved it,” Fredericka said plaintively.
“But the British muskrat is different from the American,” Freddy said. “Are you sure that what you saw was a muskrat?”
“No, I’m not sure, but the resemblance was uncanny,” Fredericka answered, “and whatever it was it was doing its business right where you rested your face. Which brings up the question, now that we are injured, bleeding, and exhausted, how do we get to a five-star hotel?”
“The money!” screamed Freddy. In an instant he was back in the water, where for the next half hour he worked as hard as ever he had worked in his life. This was the first ten thousand pounds he had actually earned, and he came back to her with it as if it were the Silver Chalice, which it wasn’t.
Dragging the Opheliated parachute through the brine had further exhausted him, but the money in it was not the only reason to do so. They could not walk about Manhattan, or hope to register at a hotel, in mud-coated hracneets. But with Fredericka’s internationally famous touch for clothing, they would convert the many yards of parachute nylon into something acceptable, if not even chic, for street wear. Fredericka thought upon the fact that the world’s fashion magazines might eventually be full of parachute dresses: it was not unreasonable. In Devon, once, she had pinned a few sprigs of goldenrod to a crème-and-lavender Ben Metumtam cocktail dress, and the fad had swept the globe, netting her more than twenty thousand letters of thanks from allergists alone.
But they had nothing with which to cut, and were unwilling to risk enlargement of the now prominent gaps in their upper front teeth. “Not to worry,” Fredericka said, after seeing how difficult it was to rip through the reinforcing grids of heavily woven nylon, “we’ll bunch them up the way Chaco did two years ago in Paris.”
“I confess to having missed it.”
“It was extremely hot. Chaco said that all the balloony, gauzy white fabric sent a message of sex. You can come to bed with me even while I’m standing up. Deep in the clouds of Zanzibar lies the dark delta of Venus, or something like that.”
“That’s what Chaco said, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Somehow, I think that Chaco might not be interested in that himself.”
“Oh no,” said Fredericka, “Chaco is unambiguously bi. He’s also ambidextrous.”
The end result of Fredericka’s swamp couture, however, probably would have pleased Chaco a great deal. They kept their leather flight caps to keep the mud and filth off their hair, and so seemed to have completely bald, moose-coloured, pointy heads. Freddy’s two upper front teeth were gone, as were Fredericka’s. Instinctually, they repeatedly ran over the empty spaces with their tongues, which had a pronounced effect on their expressions—it did something especially peculiar to the eyes—and made them appear perhaps less intelligent than they were. Their heads stuck out from the centres of their parachutes, which hung fashionably caftan-style from their arms, but to walk they had to bunch up the material they could not cut away, and it circled waist, thighs, and knees in ever larger rings, as if they were walking in a tower of white doughnuts. This, Fredericka had accomplished with the great deal of line available, and it was fairly trim.
“Shall we keep the goggles?” she asked.
“Let’s hang on to everything we’ve got.”
“I don’t want to wear them on my head.”
“You’re the couturière.”
“Ah, I know. We’ll bunch them up in this fabric here that trails, and carry them in a ball in front of our stomachs. It’s the Mali look from three years ago.”
“Chaco again?”
“No, Berenice Edouard Bluvair.”
“You do realise, Fredericka, that your breast hracneets are visible every time you move your arms.”
“That’s marvellous,” she said, “and fashionable. It’s called a cadenced peekaboo. It drives men crazy. Far more hypnotic than flat-out bare bosoms.”
“Tonight,” Freddy promised, “you will have your five-star hotel,” but he was not absolutely sure. Though his royal confidence, when conflated with his oft-felt black despair, was always victorious, this was an unusual place, where the rules might be incomprehensible.
“Follow me,” he said. They set out into a landscape of mud, reeds, and the hulks of mechanical things. This detritus—what remained of cars, televisions, refrigerators, boats, metallic construction debris, and sharp rusty things of indeterminate origin—mysteriously littered the swamp. How did it get there? It did not float. After a few minutes’ consideration, Freddy surmised that it must have been dumped from barges at high tide.
Their royal cuts and abrasions were soon joined by scores of razor-like wounds inflicted by the reeds, and their feet were punctured many times by reed stems and other sharp things embedded in the mud. They walked toward the houses on the hill, which Freddy judged to be at least a mile and a half away. In the other directions lay only roads, rail lines, and frenetic industry. The houses looked more inviting, though in the moonlight even they had a siniste
r air, their windows being almost Halloween-coloured and dim, and their dark unrelieved shapes on the palisade as forbidding as the most derelict castle.
“Though we may not find help in one of those houses,” Freddy said, having given up hope of boutiques or expresso bars, “we should be able to find a taxi. Taxis come to me even when I don’t want them.”
“Would it take sterling?” Fredericka asked.
“I should think so. After all, it’s New York.”
“New York is across the river. This is Ho-Ho-Kus.”
“No, Fredericka, it is Ho-Bo-Kus.”
Their progress was slow, but after a time they had come far enough so that they were able to glimpse, off to their left and toward the motorways, the bonfire they had seen while floating down.
“Do you still think it’s an association picnic?” Fredericka asked.
“Perhaps not, but there must be people there, and if they came in, there’s undoubtedly a road out. The walking will be easier even if they don’t help us, and why wouldn’t they?”
LYING AMIDST the khaki-coloured reeds quite comfortably on their doughnut rings of parachute cloth fifty feet from the fire, they made a reconnaissance. A breeze had come up, the stars were phosphorescent, the blaze in front of them was as gold as the refinery flares miles away on the horizon, and all around, in chains of light and garlands of red, were necklaces of unending traffic.
“It’s dry here,” Fredericka whispered, “and it doesn’t smell so bad.”
“The wind,” Freddy said.
“But what is that coconut smell?” Fredericka asked, lifting her nose in the air like one of the royal beagles. In her leather aviator’s cap, she did not seem quite human. She was, however, alive to everything around her.
“Merely a noxious gas from a refinery or chemical works.”
They peered at the scene before them. “Who are those people?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’re cooking.”
“Why are they all dressed in black?”
“Leather,” Freddy whispered. “Motorcyclists require it in view of falls or slides upon the macadam. You see the motorcycles beyond the fire? The silver rods are high handlebars: for a style of motoring that, on a long trip, counterintuitively relaxes the arms and back. That’s where the music comes from.”
“From the motorcycles?”
“They’ve got big amplifiers and speakers. It isn’t allowed in England because it would disturb the peace, but here there is no peace to disturb. Everyone in this country makes as much noise as possible. It’s that way in all barbarous places. Remember the Maoris?”
“I do, but, Freddy, aren’t those swastikas? This isn’t Germany.”
“Neo-Nazis,” Freddy said.
“They have swords.”
One of them had drawn a bayonet and was brandishing it in a drunken altercation with another, who followed suit and drew his own. In slow motion timed to the music pulsing through the flames of the bonfire, they struck at one another.
“Two twenty-two-stone drunks with bayonets,” Freddy said, “and not the slightest idea how to fence.”
“We’ll go around them,” Fredericka proposed.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why should we?”
“Because they’re thirty drunken Neo-Nazis with bayonets, in the middle of a swamp in New Jersey, that’s why.”
“They’re just savages, Fredericka. They may be mechanically inclined, but they are savages. We’ve never faced such people except with friendliness and confidence. I was not born to skulk in fear, and, besides, Mamie Eisenhower was always very nice to me. She used to make excellent hot cocoa laced with something that made me feel extremely relaxed—for a child. She would carry a bottle of it in her purse and drink it herself.”
“They aren’t Mamie Eisenhower, and there are thirty of them.”
“Thirty,” he said, wistfully. “Britain has subdued whole regions of the earth with, in some instances, just a few thousand or even a few hundred men. The essence of being British is not to flinch from such encounters.”
“The essence of being British,” Fredericka asserted, “is compassion for one’s fellow man.”
As Freddy rose up in his full doughnutted grandeur and began a procession through the reeds, she followed.
The motorcycles were parked in a semicircle blocking the road, and the motorcyclists gathered around the bonfire were standing, sitting, squatting, dancing, prone, or out like a light. Their chiefs with their consorts sat on several car-seat benches and a couch without cushions. They ceaselessly lifted silver-coloured containers of beer to their lips, draining them in a few swallows. The litter of beer vessels through which they lurched and danced was a foot high. They did what those who sit on disembodied automobile seats in a swamp and drink beer by a bonfire do. That is, they smoked cigarettes and cocked their heads back as if reading messages in the sky. And for some reason they walked backward and sideways, with a staccato step, as much as they walked straight ahead. This led to occasional collisions and collapses, and seemed to be a sign of the last stages of drunkenness before a long sleep.
As Freddy and Fredericka approached, they were able to count some on the ground who had been unseen. All told, there were thirty-eight, including what appeared to be nine women, with twenty-six motorcycles in waiting. Some wore Wehrmacht helmets, SS insignia, and swastikas, others simple bandannas. The men’s extraordinarily thick forearms suggested that they trained with weights or were removal workers. On the backs of their jackets was a painting of human bones, a dancing cat, and a kitchen blender beneath the words Paramus Devil Cats.
From force of habit, when Freddy walked into their midst he showed a gracious smile. Fredericka, at his side, had the air of someone trained not to flinch at flashbulbs. Freddy knew what Fredericka looked like in her tori of parachute cloth and brown leather cap, and she knew what he looked like, but each gave himself the benefit of the doubt. Never having seen anything like these visitors, and fairly speechless ordinarily, the Paramus Devil Cats were silent as if mesmerised.
“How do you do?” asked Freddy. “Frederick and Fredericka Finney.” The prince and princess smiled. “And you?” he asked the stunned Devil Cats. “You are, I take it, Paramus,” which he pronounced Para-moose, “Neo-Nazis?”
Some of the Devils looked away as if to clear their vision, but when they looked back Freddy and Fredericka were still there.
“Hey, man,” said one of them. It didn’t mean hello, and was not a greeting. No one knew what it meant, not even the one who said it.
“How do you do?” Freddy repeated. Fredericka displayed her charming look, a tortured smile that said many things, none of which was true in any respect. No one came forward or said anything, so Freddy, clutching the ball of cloth over his stomach, occasionally thrusting his finger into the gap in his upper teeth, and now and then wiping the dirt and oil around on his besmottered face, took the initiative. “Say,” he said, “do the taxis here take sterling?”
“What the hell are you?” asked one of the Devils, apparently their chief.
“I’m the Prince of Wales, and this is my wife, the Princess of Wales.”
None of the Devils evinced any reaction whatsoever, until finally one turned to the others and said, “They’re not human, are they?”
“You see,” Freddy said, “we thought this was something like Hampstead Heath. We thought it would be surrounded by bookshops, clothiers, antiquaries, and expresso bars. We even thought that this was an association picnic, or the outing of one of the big investment banks.” He looked at the Devils. “Perhaps the very back office.”
“You thought,” Fredericka said.
“Very well, I was wrong, but at least I thought something. You thought nothing.”
“Isn’t it better,” Fredericka asked, “to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic?”
“It wasn’t completely idiotic, it was entirely reasonable, but when you are about to jump from an aeroplane into an abyss it is in fact not better to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic.”
“Hey, man,” one of the Devils said, as if he were on a timer.
“You shut up, I’m not finished,” Fredericka commanded. “You see, Freddy, you’re always getting us into trouble like this because you feel that you have to have an answer for every question.”
“If you’re going to jump, Fredericka, you have to choose a landing zone.”
“What I am saying, Freddy, is that you don’t.”
“You mean, just throw yourself from the plane at random?”
“One mustn’t do that,” she said. “If you did that, you might almost drown in a swamp and then have to muck your way through a mile of reeds and an army of Neo-Nazis.”
“We’re not Neo-Nazis,” said the chief.
“You’re not?”
“No. What makes you think so?”
“The way you dress,” said Freddy.
“Hey, man, we’re having a party. You wanna start something?”
“Freddy, just shut up,” Fredericka commanded.
“I will not,” said Freddy. Then, turning to the Devils, he said, “Resolved, you are Neo-Nazis.”
“Bull . . . shit!” said a Devil.
“Then why,” Freddy pressed, “is each and every one of you sporting one or more swastikas, SS insignia, Afrika Korps badges, Wehrmacht helmets, and/or Nuremberg daggers?”
“We don’t like Nazis, man. We hate Nazis. My father was in World War Two,” the chief said.
“On which side?”
“America’s side.”
“Then why do you dress this way?”
“I don’t know,” the chief replied, a blank look on his face.
“You don’t know?”
“No.” He didn’t.
“Is it drugs?” asked Freddy.
“Yeah, it’s drugs. What is it?”
“The way you are.”
“Yeah. It’s drugs, drugs and alcohol.”
“Who are you?” Freddy asked. “Why do you behave this way? What do you want?”
