“THE BEETLES!” Asthma shouts. “GODDAMNIT, Pea Pod!”
“The ants make a paste,” Charter explains gently. “They roll it into little balls the size of peas and put it in a cabinet. The cabinet is locked. When the ants go to sleep, the Papesse sends her butler—”
“Not her butler,” Asthma complains. “It can’t be her butler. It has to be her . . . her . . . I don’t know what!”
“You’re fast, Asthma,” Charter says. “He’s called the butler—and you’ll see why—but in fact he’s a footman, and like all beetles he has sticky feet. Once he’s snuck into the laboratory and opened the cabinet, he collects the balls of cinnabar with his sticky feet and then he carries them to the Papesse. Who has been waiting for him all night long impatiently. Because her color is fading and she needs him to—”
“WAX HER!” Asthma exults. “See? Pea Pod? WAX her all over!”
“Which is why he’s called ‘the butler,’” Charter interjects triumphantly. “It’s his way of dressing her. He’s also called: the Butterer.”
“It’s not a story!” Pea Pod screams. “IT’S NOT A STORY! Let’s go to your room! Like Goldie said we were supposed to.” She stomps off.
“I’m staying here with Brightfellow,” Asthma says, pressing a little square of pink bubble gum into the palm of his hand. “The Butterer.” She smirks.
The philosophers warn us that our perceptions are not to be trusted, yet we must assume that the mother is soused when she slurs her consonants, that the child is making fudge when the heavy copper pot is brought out and set on the stove. And it is a fine thing when our perceptions pan out. As when Asthma appears at Billy’s door with that very fudge, still warm, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting on Blackie’s lawn between two little girls smelling of summertime, eating fudge with your fingers.
It is Saturday; the sound of ice tumbling from freezer trays shatters in the air. And here is Goldie, gin and tonic in hand, dressed to the nines, her face painted within every inch of its life, and with a plan for the rest of the afternoon. She will take us to town for a movie, the girls and I will have our supper at the soda fountain. (Cheers at all this.) After, Goldie will fetch us and bring us all home. She’s footing the bill, she assures me.
The impossible unfolds. We are in Goldie’s car. We are leaving the Circle, driving past the library, the empty classrooms, the outlying woods—and then the road is flanked for long minutes by trees—the clam shack, gas station, Annie’s next; the little houses painted white and green. The scarred place where my father’s house once stood. Farmland and then Hawkskill, its grocery, its five-and-dime, its bar, and the very heart of downtown. And we are walking into the Moonlight Theater. I am handing our tickets over to a boy who tears them apart. I am buying Tootsie Rolls, overseen by a brass sphinx and an eighth-grader in braids, then guiding the girls past a plaster obelisk carved with dismembered feet and hands, sacred ladders, pancakes, and birds. We are treading the Moonlight’s indigo carpet, a carpet swarming with putti and stained with root beer. Sitting at last in the blue shadows, the girls at each of my elbows, taking in a shimmering red curtain, watching it part like something melting away, watching the stars orbit the mountain, the rabbit chomp his carrot and evade death; watching Jimmy Stewart, his binoculars so like my own, his habits so familiar. I sit on my little velveteen upholstered chair, fully realized: a designated guardian of little girls! And here is the irresistible Jimmy Stewart immobilized by a broken leg, just as I’ve been immobilized by a broken whatever-it-was that was broken! My soul was it? My mind? I sit as happy as I believe I was intended to be, as the girls ferret in their pockets for Tootsie Rolls and Wax Lips without once looking away from the screen.
Later, over toasted cheese sandwiches and vanilla milkshakes, the girls discuss the movie. They both disapprove of Jimmy Stewart’s nipples—“men should not have nipples!” (Asthma); “no one should have nipples!” (Pea Pod). They wonder about the logistics of cutting up a body and taking it out the door one piece at a time. They suppose the thighs look like hams and that there would have only been room for two in the suitcase. They wonder if the knees would have been attached to the thighs. They think it unjust the dog was murdered. “It was not a whiner” (Pea Pod). “It was the wife that whined” (Asthma). She turns to me, says, “Jimmy Stewart reminds me of you.”
“But I don’t have nipples,” I manage.
“Looking out that window, stupid,” she says.
“We all do that,” I tell her. “That is what windows are for.” I make a strange noise in spite of myself, something like a frog being strangled.
“You do so have nipples!” Pea Pod says ragefully. “Everybody does! It doesn’t make any sense!” She decides.
“I like spying,” says Asthma.
“She spies on you!” cries Pea Pod, sloppily sucking foam from the bottom of her glass with a straw. And then, as the earth heaves under me, she adds: “She’s a peep peep, peep peep, peeping Tom” to the tune of “Sh-Boom.”
On the way home, Goldie, looking flushed and pawed over, asks Asthma what she wants to be when she grows up. Without hesitation she says:
“I want to be a pickpocket.”
“You are one hell of a tease,” says Goldie.
“I want to be a mermaid,” Pea Pod, wearing Wax Lips, whispers incomprehensibly.
“Asthma is speaking cryptically and symbolically,” I say, having regained my composure. “What she is saying is she wants to see the beauties of the world and live her life deeply.” Asthma snorts.
“Since when,” snarls Goldie, “do eight-year-olds need interpreters?”
The Époisses is pungent, it raises a stink. Charter holds his breath and takes a bite. It tastes of the forest floor, mushroom maybe, the underside of a rock. It’s fecund, impossibly rich, and it is good, astonishingly so when eaten with crusty bread and wine. There is also a Maroilles—equally fetid, outrageous, maybe even obscene, delicious. For the first time Charter tastes a Côtes du Rhône. This, he thinks, is the life.
The Époisses thickening his tongue, Billy mumbles: “Tell me more about the—what did you say they were called?”
Bloody hell . . . the wine. The wine! Charter can no longer remember.
“The Mannja . . . Mannja . . .,” Billy struggles.
“The Mannja Fnadr.” Charter recalls it. “Let’s see; well: when it thunders—and it thunders often—they strike things together, things like bones or stones. This is done to remind the gods that they, too—the Mannja Fnadr—can make a noise.”
“And when they die?”
“They say when it’s time to die, the gods pull them up to the sky by the neck with something like a fishhook.”
Billy roars with laughter. Charter joins him and for a moment they are both once again overcome with hilarity. But just as quickly Charter is sickened by this laughter. He feels he has betrayed—and how absurd this is!—these people, the Mannja Fnadr, whom he has invented! He thinks he must come up at once with a transcendent vision. He wants the Mannja Fnadr to impress Billy. He wants them to forgive him for his banalities, his facile mocking of their “savage” state!
“And the soul?” Billy asks, as if reading his mind. “What do they say of the soul?”
“They say . . . they say we each have a bird within us. A bird of breath, a bird of fire. Longing for . . . release.” Billy grows quiet all at once and his gaze clouds over.
“Longing,” Billy says. “Yes. For release. Yes. Yes! That’s it, isn’t it! What we all—”
“I never told you what Mannja Fnadr means,” Charter continues. “It means the first ones here. And they may well be. The first ones to come; the first ones with sinew in the soul.”
“Such a notion, Charter: sinew in the soul. Why that’s downright wonderful!”
“It also means: first sprouting or, if I understand correctly, first budding of the initial impulse.”
“My god! My god!” Billy rises, agitated, and begins to pace. Earnestly he says: “I s
ometimes wonder, cannot help but wonder, what if we—yes our entire species—are the first budding, the first and only, Charter! And what if we’ve . . . missed the boat?”
The early evening has moved closer to the night. In this way, eating and speaking together, they live the hours. In a brief week’s time, on such a night as this, Billy will ask Charter: “Tell me something of your father’s death. You carry it awfully close to your heart, I can tell. You said your mother had gone far too soon, but peacefully, but what of your father?”
Charter will not see this coming and he will be knocked off balance. What had happened to his father had been terrible. Charter could not tell Billy how he had run away, been homeless, a scavenger, living under porches, in cabinets stocked with dead mammals floating in formaldehyde—all that. How he had returned one day to find his father on the floor, how his father had been dead well over a week, how he had built a good fire in the middle of the house, how that fire had brought it all down, everything down to ashes. Instead he will say: “A long illness. A long and terrible illness.” Which in its way was true.
It is late. Outside, Dr. Ash is wandering in her yard. “It’s all wrapped up!” she shouts, startling them. “Wrapped up and posted!”
“I have no child,” Billy says. “The house, as you know, belongs to the college, but everything in it, what I have in the bank, well—it will all go to you. Do not protest. I have thought this over carefully. I have thought of little else for some days now.”
After Billy goes up to bed, Charter returns to the porch. Wearing a towel and barefoot, Dr. Ash is not far, her voice more or less carried by the breeze. Dearest . . . she murmurs. Dearest . . . my dear heart. There is a good breeze moving through the leaves and as it lifts the night is replete with voices. Dearest, she says. Dear heart . . . my dearest heart. He hears the cat, the crickets, the owl, the fleet passage of something or other; he sails the night on a sea of sound. Dr. Ash says: I shall make an inventory—and off she goes.
For a time hers is the only light remaining. Everyone is on their backs adrift in the night. As he sits there alone on the porch, things continue to spill past like smoke—the wood, after all, is close at hand. A fox perhaps, or hedgehog. The Circle is now theirs. He imagines this must be a relief. Their beautiful unhindered nights, the air alive with bats and fireflies, crickets, moths, things with fur, owls.
But then he catches her scent; it is Asthma, Asthma breathing just behind the screen.
“Brightfellow!” she whispers. “Dr. Ash is scratching around in the cat box!”
“No! No!” Charter leaps to his feet, startled. Horrified. “That can’t be!”
“It could be true, though.”
“Don’t upset me like that, Asthma.”
“Blackie fell asleep on the couch.”
“Go put a blanket on her, Asthma, dear. It’s a chilly night.” This appears to pain her. But as much as he adores, yes, adores, her proximity, he is unsettled by this unexpected intimacy. Panic rises within him. So he says, “I’m turning in.”
“Good night, Goodfellow,” Asthma breathes, her nose pressed to the screen. “Good night, gadabout.”
But Charter does not turn in. And now, alone on the porch in the dark, he is dismayed that he sent her away! Asthma, right there behind the screen, a breath away, gleaming! Asthma! Her breath a secret writing on the air. She surges in his mind’s eye, tucked into a bed littered with animals, crayons, books, her pajamas buzzing with planets, moons, stars. Her window as dark as the ink of squids, the deepest recess of deepest space.
He realizes for the first time—how has this escaped him?—that the houses on the Circle are all the same! Except for the way they are placed at odd angles, each with a different approach. The houses orbit the Circle, as it were, the one tugging at the other. The weather all around them ebbing and rising—a network of sighs and bewilderments.
And their windows are like eyes.
Loon, quoting one of the ancients, wrote that the white objects that shine within the eyes are engendered by white atoms, and the black objects are borne of a black seed. Charter falls asleep thinking that objects seed the eye—a lovely idea—and dreams he has made an observatory out of cardboard and paper and that it fits the Circle, illuminated by the moon. He takes Asthma by the hand and leads her around the perimeter. Asthma says: I want to look inside, and kneeling, peers into a hallway that leads straight to the big dome and its telescope. Looking into the telescope she sees her own face painted on the moon. Oh, Brightfellow! she says. Now you’ve gone and done it again, Brightfellow! And Charter knows he has “done it again” and this knowledge is terrible. But what it is he has done again he cannot say. Now you have done it again! He hears Asthma’s voice as he awakens before dawn, chilled to the bone and damp with dew. He goes inside for a shower, the dream hot in his mind, his head once again ringing. Oh, he is alive with bells. As when, years ago now, he had returned home after a long absence, and found his father there on the floor in a heap, the gentle man he had not seen much of when he had sold seeds; Charter had seen too much of the other one, broken and ghostly, who installed toilets. The doubled father, seeded black, and seeded white, who had been—with everything around him—reduced to ashes because it had seemed at the time the one and only thing that Stub could do, should do. A great big cleansing fire.
As Charter showers, Billy stirs. He hears the water running and then falls back asleep. Just as Charter gets into bed, the sun rises, Billy reawakens, and as always the somewhat incomprehensible moments unfold. Billy is aware of the slightest thorning of his heart, which he imagines is something like a tiny prick of the thinnest pin, thinner even . . . and he is aware of his nausea—this also slight; he is anxious, and this despite the presence of the boy—the boy, Charter—who (at last!) assures him a place on a planet that spins, a place to stand firmly and feet to walk as others do, without question—or so he supposes—except that today, as Charter sleeps deep into the morning, he is full of questions again. Perhaps this is all about the fact that he is on his third cup of coffee, or the fact that the sky is growing quickly darker, a thunderstorm is rolling in and the darkness, the taste of metal in the air recalls his marriage, a marriage in which—or so it seems to him now—he was often to blame for something or other. And he was to blame, after all, for a wife who had not been what he had actually wanted, when you got down to it. The young men were what quickened him, above all the young clerk at the small family-run shoe store, with whom he had once talked about the merits of a pair of oxfords. Billy had asserted that the shoes were not quite the right size although the clerk—Billy did not dare ask his name—the clerk who smelled of bitter almonds told him they were perfect, just right; they fit like a dream. He has never forgotten the feel of the clerk’s two hands on his heels, his ankles, how he looked on, captivated, as the laces were tugged and tied. He bought them, of course, the oxfords! And kept them in their box—a talisman, the clue to an essential memory, the emblem of his longing, the sinew of his soul. He never once wore them.
As the first of the rain needles the windows, Billy thinks that if they fit, he will give the oxfords to Charter. Charter will wear them and they will enable him to somehow step into his own life. An insane idea, perhaps, but Billy embraces it. It is too late for me, he thinks. But for Charter the world has only just begun.
By the time Charter descends into the kitchen, Billy is gone, gone to Kahontsi to meet with his lawyer. Billy is happy. Something important has been solved.
The day is dark, chilly—unusually so; there is rain. Looking out the front door, Charter sees Dr. Ash at her upstairs window, her mind brimming with numbers and strange ideas. He knows she is considered a genius; he has seen numbers tattooed on her wrist but does not know their significance, supposes they are emblematic of her profession. His brilliant mind is riddled with lacunae such as this. The chiming in his head is dizzying; he reverberates. His soul’s metal is hammered to within an inch of its life and he is cold. Soon it will be fall, he thi
nks, although it is only June. Trembling, he decides to build a fire; there is nothing to do but build a fire.
There are no logs by Billy’s fireplace, so he goes down to the basement, where he finds stacks of cardboard, the Ohneka Tribune, and a few old orange crates. He makes logs of cardboard and paper rolled together and tied with string, breaks up the crates, and constructs a fire, setting the logs down on top of the kindling. He spills kerosene liberally and lights a match, then watches as the entire structure bursts into flame. It’s beautiful! But the damned thing starts to roar and smoke floods the room. Charter is at a loss; smoke fills his nose, his eyes; and the mantel is smoking, sizzling! The map of France hanging above it cracks and glass rains down.
Charter dashes to the sofa, grabs a pillow, and shoves it into the hearth; he grabs another, then a third. Runs into the kitchen for a basin of water and sends it cascading into the mess. The room smells like smoke, toasted rayon, and chicken feathers. He sits down on the couch, devastated.
“You’ve really done it now,” says Asthma, coming into the room. She sits down next to him. “Everybody knows these fireplaces are pretend.” Then, quickly, breathlessly, she leans to his ear and says: “Dullfellow. My best-ever friend.”
There is no way out of this dilemma, no way to explain it. Agitated, pale, Charter dashes up the path as soon as he hears Billy’s car. Asthma is there also, bouncing with excitement.
“Something terrible has happened!” Charter cries, clearly distraught. “Something terrible!”
Billy, deeply concerned, embraces Charter, says, “My boy! My boy! What has happened?”
“Fire!” Asthma explodes. “But we caught it in time! Didn’t we, Brightfellow?”
Billy enters the living room, sees the damage to the fireplace, the map of France, the ceiling blackened with smoke—the mess on the floor where the scorched pillows have left a mark.
“It is amazing,” Billy says with good humor, “when you think of it, that this has not happened before. It is irrational, irrational—like so much in our world—to build a fireplace that cannot hold a fire! It’s O.K., Charter. I’ll give a call to Buildings and Grounds and we will get on with what remains of the day.” He bends over and pecks Asthma on the cheek, says, “You have spunk. I do appreciate that in a child.”
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