The crisp woman cupped her hands and hulloed.
A man from one of the other boats called back, “We're going to follow a cruise ship, so we have some place at night."
There was a general brightening up of the three of us, excluding, of course, the autistic woman, who was looking at the other boats and humming. The Englishman still looked rueful.
"Maybe you could go without flying yourself?” I asked. But he only shook his head.
By then the sun was well up and the haze had burned off and they all stood up and sort of let their shoulders go back and drop, their chests rising and opening in a way that would please my yoga teacher, they began one by one to rise.
* * * *
Once back on land, I realized that I could go to France, too. I couldn't fly, but I could fly in an airplane. I went straight home and got on Priceline and without telling anyone, booked a ticket to Paris that afternoon. It only cost about $2,000. I put in that I would come back at the end of the month, although I didn't really know. I was delighted that I could actually get a ticket right then and there, for that day. It was like something in a movie.
And good thing I had. I went straight to the airport even though my plane wouldn't leave until nine that evening. Like the fliers, I didn't take much. I went dressed in my old T-shirt and exercise pants but I did have to take a little bag with my wallet and my passport. When I got to the airport there were dozens of people who had dropped everything to go to France. Most of them were having trouble getting tickets and some of them were making elaborate arrangements that would take them to Germany or Ireland or even to Italy before they could get to France. I had been lucky that my compulsion was not so strong that I couldn't stop and get on Priceline.
I went back to the gate, which was in a special part of the airport for Internationals, where the floor wasn't carpet, just tile. The Duty Free shop was open. Such a nice phrase, “Duty Free.” Actually, I kind of like having a duty, though. In the end, I couldn't go empty handed the way the fliers had. I had packed a shirt, a pair of jeans and underwear in a little bag I used for yoga. I had packed a towel, too, because it was always in the bag anyway, along with my shampoo and deodorant in case I had to meet a client after yoga class.
A guy named Brian who had a boat and who had been out on the water that morning with the fliers said that going to Ireland wouldn't be so bad. It was at least on the way. Lindbergh had stopped at Ireland on his way to France, hadn't he?
I didn't think he had, but one of the reasons I had started taking yoga was to be less self centered which in my case meant less of a know it all and even though most of the time I still corrected people and pontificated and even in yoga class still wanted the teacher to notice how good I was doing, I didn't say anything this time.
Brian didn't have any luggage or any carry-on which had caused him a lot of trouble at the airport because not having luggage is a sign that you might be a terrorist. I'd had to surrender my deodorant and shampoo because they were more than 3 ozs. But Brian had been searched and interviewed. There were so many people there who wanted to go to France that someone finally realized that it was not a plot but something else. Brian said one of the TSA guys was trying to go to France, and he explained it, although how it could be explained I don't know.
I'm sure there were people there who were flying to France for other reasons, like vacations or work, but most of us were just Going to France. We sat around without the usual airport feeling because it didn't matter what time we left or got there, about luggage and reservations or connections or schedules. It's amazing how nice an airport is when you're not worried.
It's true that we are free to do whatever we want, even go to France on a whim. We can make any choice we want. We can do anything we want. We just have to not care about consequences.
I didn't care about consequences, but at about seven, I knew I wasn't going to France. I didn't say anything to anyone, not even Brian, who I knew was going. I could tell that several other people weren't going. We just weren't. We didn't have the Going to France look anymore. I stopped at the ticket counter on my way out and explained to them that I wasn't going and that I didn't have any luggage so they wouldn't think since I didn't get on the plane there was some terrorist threat. I didn't want the people like Brian to be delayed. I canceled my ticket, even though it was nonrefundable. Maybe someone else could go. I got in my car and went home.
It wasn't that I couldn't go to France, it was just that I wasn't. Maybe it had worn off. Maybe I had caught a mild case from the fliers but it hadn't lasted. I didn't know. I felt kind of sad. When I got home I didn't want to go in my house.
I left my bag in my car and started walking to my mother's house. My mother lived in the same house she had since I was ten, a little brick ranch. It was a couple of miles away and I had never walked there before because I had to cross several major streets. But that night, I walked. My neighborhood is full of old split levels and even smaller houses, like mine, which only has two bedrooms and no basement. As I walked farther I went through a neighborhood full of newer, bigger, two-story homes. One of the houses, which was brick on the bottom half and siding on the top, now had a huge clock in the side of it. The clock was set in a huge wave of metal, shining pink in the setting sun. I went this way to the grocery and the house had never had a clock in it before. It was big, with an ornate hour and minute hand and no numbers, just an ivory face with a design like ivy down near where the seven would have been. But the siding around the clock had been changed into some substance like porcelain that rose and swirled organic. Suburbia has always struck me as a little strange, but before it had been a boring, overly sincere falseness, and it was as if that clock was about a different suburbia full of beautiful manmade things, full of artifice.
I thought about my mother's house, walking through the darkness. When I got there it would be the end of the day and maybe I'd have a daiquiri or a Manhattan, and maybe my mother would have one with me. I didn't really know if I wanted a drink, but it would be a kind of punctuation on the day.
I was at an intersection: traffic lights, four lanes wide plus turn lanes in all directions, waiting to cross, maybe only half a mile from my mother's house. A dry cleaner, a drug store, buildings all pressed close to the street without much space between them. A Ford pickup was stopped at the light in one direction. The sky was dark but still glowed purple and luminous the way it will some nights, especially before a tornado. A young unkempt guy with a beard sprinted across the light and an SUV coming around the corner fast lost it trying to avoid him and went up on two wheels as it started to roll over and everything froze in place. I could see the underside of the SUV, all that car stuff of struts and differentials and muffler and catalytic converter. I looked around. Time wasn't stopped. The DON'T WALK light was flashing and although things were frozen, it was imperfect, and after a moment, like the moment of a held breath, the truck floored it and went through the intersection past the frozen tumbling SUV. The guy running had only one foot on the ground, but his raised left foot wiggled back and forth on his ankle, as if he was finding his way to movement. A big orange sneaker, with a big white toe, waggling.
I looked at it all and I knew it was all right. It was only just beginning.
[Back to Table of Contents]
American Dreamers
Caleb Wilson
1. Ellzy Tarbutton loved the pulps. She spent her entire twelfth year (in what doctors assumed would soon be her deathbed) reading mysteries printed on the cheap, smeary paper. Her illness, which weakened and wasted her body but did not affect her mind, manifested in the form of marks and stains like a schematic that wriggled beneath her skin. She discovered them in the night, peeling back the sweat-stained bedclothes to poke at a swollen lymph node only to find herself covered in a living diagram.
Ellzy's steady diet of crime and clues kindled in her the desire for answers. She opened her first case the day she woke up suddenly cured, the aching, the rash, and the painful sen
sitivity to light all having subsided overnight. She jumped out of bed and threw open the window to fresh air she hadn't tasted in nearly twelve months, eager to solve the mystery of where she'd contracted the illness.
During convalescence Ellzy's hands had been too shaky to write, forcing her to invent methods of mental note-taking that would serve her well in the years to come. She had spent hours mentally recording in detail her life just prior to the fever's striking. Once recovered, she combed her mental files and the link appeared almost instantly—the night before she woke scratching and covered in black welts, she had lifted a floorboard in the attic to hide her private diary and discovered a pile of blue glass shards in the dusty cavity. A chip of glass drew blood from her fingertip. The cut itched and pulsed. The source of the contagion.
Case closed; of course others followed. During Ellzy's adolescence, no petty crime went unsolved on the Tarbutton's block.
Ellzy's father, a parasite who had moved to Baltimore after his late parents’ farm in upstate New York was bought out and razed to make way for an experimental utopia, and her mother, the second-rate jazz singer her father had married after she became pregnant, did not resist when their sickly, pistol-packing, crime-solving daughter left home in her late teens and rented her own apartment.
During the mid 1930s Ellzy built her reputation as a detective, along with the network of contacts and spies that had come to be known as “Ellzy's Army."
But she was always easily distracted. After assembling the clues to a case, arriving at a stage where she could swoop in and grab the killer and the glory, she would often turn over all her notes to a police detective. She spoke to her employees of sudden doubts about her profession, about the possibility of knowing anything at all; that it was crazy, Quixotic, to pair cause and effect with any degree of certainty.
When under such existential spells, Ellzy would retreat to her downtown laboratory and invent new devices to help in fighting crime. Her first invention that proved useful was the “Ellzy plate,” a multi-sensitive floor that bank owners could install in their vaults. The floor automatically recorded, on a rolling drum, data for each person who walked on it, including body heat, gait, presence or absence of a limp, weight, and heel versus toe pressure. After comparing this with data taken by having jailed criminals walk across a test plate at the Baltimore police headquarters (and those whom juries refused to find guilty, across a surreptitious plate sunken in the floor just outside the courtroom), Ellzy could tell with a ninety percent accuracy whether any particular bank robbery had been performed by a known criminal or a newcomer.
On one occasion, Ellzy was confounded by the information she read off the plate's data roll in the basement of a newly robbed bank. She abandoned the case and ran through the slush toward the hospital where her mother was committed. There Ellzy asked her ailing mother to confirm that she herself did not, in fact, have a twin.
Ellzy was very wealthy—from her reward money, it was generally assumed—but the banknotes stacked in safes around her office did not make her happy. Each case she solved left her feeling more lost and less aware of what she was searching for in the first place.
In 1939, Ellzy's fever returned, as it was to do every few months until she vanished from this world. Despite her debilitating palsy, she refused to stay bedridden, and to combat the running temperature that made her feel as though her flesh were melting from her body in ribbons, she took ice baths, which left her blue and shivering but freed her mind to run with a clarity she'd never before known. She came to believe that she was meant to solve the greatest mystery of all, the reason for humanity's existence (and by extension, her own).
More and more Ellzy relegated the contracted detective work to her lieutenants, who, under her vague if expert guidance, solved all manner of robberies and murders without her direct involvement.
By 1943, Ellzy saw the world as a jungle of gears, switches, and circuits. She felt webs of connection between herself and each other person who trundled through the streets of Baltimore as if on track lines. The webs formed a massive code, and the scribblings that cluttered her own body during the bouts of fever were, she believed, the key.
She began to build machines with no discernible purpose. They clicked and whirred in odd corners of her offices, peering out of shadows with reflective fish-eye lenses at members of the Army as they dropped off money, or took money to buy the increasingly strange supplies Ellzy required. Her minions claimed to be able to hear Ellzy talking, either to herself, or to her machines, late every night until the sun rose.
Accusations and dirty rumors filled the streets, with H. L. Mencken himself writing a column exposing the supposed perils of trusting women with police work. People said that Ellzy was the greatest robber of all, that she crept about at night, strength augmented by pipes and pistons latched to her limbs—dark illegal inventions that let her rip the doors from bank vaults like they were made of crepe paper.
The police raided Ellzy's offices early one morning in 1945. The evidence was indisputable: serial numbers on the bills in her safes matched those stolen in heists all over Baltimore, crimes she'd been unable to solve. But her offices were empty of life, filled to the rafters with dense tangles of machinery, dials that ticked and whirled, meters and spinning readouts.
The police detective leading the raid, a man named Edward Barksdale, ordered the building torched. When later asked to explain his actions, he claimed that nobody else should look at Ellzy's machine. The police captain asked why not—had Ellzy Tarbutton found what she was looking for? What was the purpose of the machine? And where had she gone? Barksdale insisted that Ellzy's machine was of a highly personal nature, being built from instructions “engraved on her own flesh” (incidentally raising some question as to how he was so familiar with Ellzy's flesh), and that she had indeed vanished in search of answers, but that in so doing, she had sacrificed everything.
Apparently whatever mystery Ellzy had solved was not one whose solution others, who had not paid her price, deserved to know.
* * * *
2. Roger Townsend Rogers, born 1898 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, refused to follow any path that he himself did not hew. From a young age it was clear that he had a rare imagination. His father, a moody and foul-tempered man plagued with chronic tinnitus after attending a disasterous concert in Vermont some years before the young Rogers's birth, was generally uninterested in his son's wild stories, usually characterizing them as “lies” and rewarding them with his belt. Perhaps Rogers might have become an author, were it not for his dyslexia, which made reading and writing a frustrating chore; sadly, he also lacked all natural artistic ability when it came to manipulating the artist's pencil and brush or the sculptor's pick. It was not until 1920, after being forced from home and moving to Maryland, and with the discovery that would make him famous, if only to the tiniest sliver of avant-garde Baltimore, that he was able to translate the glorious pictures that crowded his mind into reality.
Rogers found in his pantry one August morning a loaf of bread, speckled with green-gray mold. Two circular colonies of mold were spaced as evenly as eyes, with a third and fourth looking like nose and mouth, creating on the loaf a crude upward-smiling face. Rogers, who was still queasy from the previous night's carousing, was struck by the similarity between the loaf's face and his father's; the one thing missing from the portrait was a bit of color. The nose, preferably, would be larger and a good deal redder. The cheeks, too, could be improved by the suggestion of a spreading network of flushed, broken-veined skin, and the eyes, as well, should be reddened to indicate the model's traditional bloodshot condition.
In a fit of inspiration he called on his good friend Francis Bardelon, a lifelong bachelor, who could always be counted upon to have five or six moldy foodstuffs in various places around his lodgings.
Bardelon joined the hunt for excitingly colored mold. Although it was Rogers who found a plate of angel-hair beneath Bardelon's bed, covered in dollops of crimson mold, Bardelon di
scovered, inside the trumpet of a phonograph, an ancient sodden cracker on which grew a golden, thread-like mildew. Rogers quickly recognized that this mildew, if persuaded to grow thinly enough atop the loaf of bread, would represent perfectly the scant hair of his father's sunburned scalp.
The resemblance of his father to the loaf, once the rouge grew from the nose and cheeks, the red pipes threaded the eyes, and the sparse hair had sprouted from the sides of the head, was remarkable.
At first Rogers thought he had found his medium, but soon he became dissatisfied. The mold, although brightly colored, tended toward round colonies, making it suitable for little more than pointillism.
For a brief period he experimented with propagating amoebas in dyed water, but they proved difficult to train; the collages dissolved within seconds. The paramecium was a more tractable subject, although it was impossible to wedge them closely together, or indeed to breed them in great quantities at all, which left his pictures faint and hard to see except under certain types of light.
After a year of further experiments, both with algae, which performed adequately but never matched the beauty of what he imagined, and with rotifers, which were too voracious and quickly devoured one another, Rogers found the perfect medium: the bacterium, which ran through generations quickly, allowing easy breeding of brightly colored varieties, and which were in many cases motile.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Page 3
