And Go Like This

by John Crowley

  “Go back to my house, I mean the place there you saw.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  That must be true, Harry thought. Her face at the window, her hand shielding the sunlight to peer through the dirt? Not true.

  “But Harry. You can’t live there. You have to think.”

  When at last he was allowed to drive the Oldsmobile by himself summer was nearly over. He almost drove past his place by the river; it seemed enfeebled, invisible. The door resisted him, swollen like an old joint. Inside, mouse turds littered the drainboard; a lovely bloom of white mold covered the unremoved food scraps. Harry flung open the windows, cleaned up what could be cleaned—the place had long since reached that point of equanimity between old dirt and new cleansing that could not now be altered.

  The computer sat where it had, the stack of floppies still beside it. It hadn’t actually been shut off on the summer day when Harry never returned. He pressed its start button. Even as he was remembering what he would see—the mystic information he had left there—it swam into focus. Woman. Womb. Woe.

  He had been to the other side, had returned alive and chastened, and this problem was still set for him. Very carefully he sat on the kitchen chair, not taking his eyes from the screen. He moved to take up, but then didn’t touch, the Dragon headset still plugged in. There was a tiny light on it, he saw now, amber when he noticed it, then turning green. On.

  One of the day’s number of gravel trucks approached—Harry could tell by now that’s what it was—and rushed past, its sound cresting as it passed, then falling to low and soft as it went away. The Doppler effect, wasn’t that the name?

  A new word had appeared on the screen:

  wound

  Harry pressed his hand to his chest, as he did now a hundred times a day, querying or comforting. Wound. He would have long pondered this word too in spooked ignorance, but it was just then, in a moment of transformed understanding—as though his shirt had been put on backward and now was suddenly righted—that Harry got it. He picked up the Dragon headset and pointed it toward the open window and the road. Another truck went by the house. Another word:

  well

  He laughed aloud. Two other trucks rolled by in quick succession. Well well averred the Dragon.

  What it was—if only every miracle were so susceptible of explanation!—was the whoosh of a truck’s going by being picked up by the microphone; and because, as Harry had learned, the program was incapable of displaying a sound except as an English word, it produced the best one it could.

  He sat a long time before the screen. “Well,” he said. All will be well. All manner of thing will be well. Was it only his imagination (of course it was only his imagination) that the computer looked a little diminished, abashed and apologetic?

  He would have to remove his fractious Dragon friend and put it away; it hadn’t really done nor ever would do what it promised. He unplugged the mike. He should call Mila, he thought, and tell her this story, how he had been spoken to as by a Ouija board, spoken to about her, and himself. Mila, we have to talk.

  He turned off the machine, matter unsaved, and went into the sad sitting room with its ragged rag rug and its humble linoleum. Yet the day was beautiful, darling September, his favorite month, and smiling so sweetly. For a time yet the windows could remain still open; smell of sun-heated hay, or dried leaves, from somewhere. All will be well. On an impulse—an impulse he’d remember, looking back—Harry picked up the remote and turned on the television.

  Conversation Hearts

  On the day before Valentine’s Day the snow advancing from the west suddenly became a storm; the snow would cover them and then deepen rapidly (the radio weather said) toward the east as evening came. Perry and Lily (she in first, he in third grade) were sent home early from school, the telephone tree reaching the Nutting’s house just as John Nutting was about to pick up the phone to call the Astra Literary Agency in Boston, to tell his wife that she should probably start for home as soon as she could. When he got the office, he was told that Ann-Marie, his wife’s agent, was actually meeting Meg in a restaurant in Brookline. John considered calling the restaurant and paging her, but that seemed somehow too alarmist, and he sat and waited instead for the kids to get home.

  The snow was already a couple of inches deep by the time the bus stopped in front of the house, so John lifted Lily off and carried her. Perry followed after with Lily’s crutches. John set Lily down in the hall and helped with her coat.

  “Now we can make valentines,” Lily said, who had wanted to the night before, but John had got out the box of lace doilies and red hearts and glue and stickers too late, and Meg had said no, time for bed, causing something of an uproar for which John felt himself still in the doghouse all around. So now he said yes they’d make valentines, and Perry sagged and groaned in a fine display of weary disgust, though John knew he actually liked making paper things of any kind and was (John thought) actually highly gifted, in a way; and all talking and thinking and disputing, they went into the kitchen and got going.

  “Are you going to make valentines, Daddy?”

  “I’m going to make one. For Mom.”

  “Is she your valentine?”

  “I think so.”

  “Me too?”

  “You too.”

  “Did Mom go to see Anne-Marie?” Perry asked.

  “Yes, that’s why she went. She wants to talk about her new book. The kid’s book.”

  “Is it a chapter book?” Lily asked.

  “Yes.” John considered. “As I remember, it is a chapter book.”

  “I could read it,” Perry said, with an air of negligent competence.

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “What’s the story about?” Lily asked. She actually knew, but liked to hear it again.

  “It’s about,” John said, “a little girl who has no fur.”

  Lily laughed. “Girls don’t have fur.”

  “You don’t have fur?”

  “No, Daddy.”

  “Well then maybe this book’s about you.”

  “I doubt it,” she said, grinning, which made Perry laugh aloud.

  [FIRST CHAPTER]

  When you look up into the sky at night, all the stars you can see are really suns, like the sun that shines on Earth. Some stars are bigger suns than our sun, and some are smaller; some are hotter, and some are not as hot. Some stars have planets going around them, just as Earth goes around our sun.

  Maybe one star you can see on a clear dark night has a planet going around it that is like Earth, only different.

  Maybe there are animals and people living on this planet who are like the people who live on Earth—only different.

  Say the people are like us, and have hands and feet and two eyes (one eye on each side of their nose) and a mouth underneath; and two ears, one for each side of their heads. And heads too.

  Only say that instead of plain skin they have beautiful thick soft fur all over, from head to foot, even on the backs of their hands and the tops of their feet.

  And say that the bottoms of their feet are thick and tough as shoe soles.

  And say that the name of this planet is Brxx.

  A woman named Qxx and man named Fxx lay awake late at night in their house on the planet Brxx. It was a cold night, but the windows of their house were open. Actually the house didn’t have any windows, only big open spaces in the walls through which the wind came in. Qxx and Fxx didn’t mind, because they were both covered from head to foot in their own beautiful thick soft fur. Qxx’s fur was red.

  Qxx and Fxx were awake because they were thinking about the new baby that Qxx was soon to have. They were also awake because Qxx was so big with the new baby that she couldn’t get comfortable in bed. (Actually they didn’t have a bed; they slept together on a wide flat rock, but they didn’t mind because their t
hick fur was as good as a mattress and a blanket together.)

  Since they couldn’t sleep, they were talking about what they would name the new baby.

  “I’ve always liked the name Trxx,” said Qxx.

  “I’ve always liked that name too,” said Fxx. “But it’s a girl’s name. What if this baby is another boy?”

  Qxx and Fxx already had a baby boy, named Pxx, who was curled up cozy and asleep in his own room, on the stone floor.

  “It’s not a boy,” said Qxx. “I know.”

  “How do you know?” asked Fxx.

  “I know,” said Qxx.

  The new baby was a girl. But as soon as Fxx and Qxx saw her, they knew she was different from other babies.

  Trxx was pink and smooth. Her eight tiny fingers were pink and her eight tiny toes were pink too. Her knees were wrinkled and so were her elbows. On top of her head there were a few strands of dark hair—but except for those, Trxx was naked all over.

  Trxx had no fur.

  “Oh dear,” said Fxx. “Oh my stars.”

  “Oh,” said Qxx. “Oh my baby.” She was almost afraid to hold the newborn baby, she looked so strange.

  “I’m sorry,” said the doctor who had helped Trxx get born, whose name was Nxx. “It happens sometimes. Not very often. But it can happen. I’m so sorry,” she said again, and she really was sorry.

  Trxx didn’t look like her brother, Pxx, when he was born; when Pxx was born he already had thick fur, over all his body, and on his feet he already had the beginnings of the thick tough pads that would protect his feet when he grew up and learned to walk. So did all the other babies born in the town that day, just as they had thick warm fur, red or brown or blue.

  But Trxx didn’t.

  She didn’t look like a baby of the planet Brxx at all. She looked a lot more like a baby of planet Earth. She looked like you and I looked when we were first born.

  “Will she ever change?” asked Qxx. Her eyes filled with tears. “Will she ever grow fur and be like other people?”

  “No,” said Dr. Nxx, and her eyes filled with tears too. “No, she never will.”

  “Oh, my poor baby,” said Qxx. She started to cry.

  Fxx started to cry too. So did little Pxx.

  The only one who didn’t cry was baby Trxx.

  “All right,” said Fxx, and he wiped his eyes with the fur of his hands. “All right, no more crying for a while. Not having fur is too bad. It’s a bad deal, and it’s going to be a lot of trouble for us, and a lot of trouble for Trxx. But she’s our baby. And we love her.”

  “Just the way she is,” said her brother Pxx.

  “Yes,” said her mother Qxx. “Just the way she is. And that’s what matters most.”

  * * *

  “Look, Dad,” Perry said. “Lily’s jumping for joy.”

  Lily had recently figured out how to lift her whole body up off the floor with her crutches, like someone on a pogo stick; she lifted, dropped, lifted, dropped, in delight. Meg called it Jumping for Joy. Lily called it dancing. Sometimes she could turn herself around as she came down, so that she could actually jump in circles. She stopped after a while—it was surely pretty exhausting—and came to study what her father was doing.

  “Is that the pin for Mom?” she said. He took it from its little box, out from its white blankets of cotton batting.

  “Yes. Do you like it?”

  Lily shrugged elaborately, who am I to say, but with a smirk of delight, in herself or the gesture or the day or the gift. The pin was dark steel, a pin for a coat lapel say, that was an arrow, made in such a way as to look when it was worn as though it pierced the fabric through, though it didn’t really, it was an illusion; and on the arrow’s top instead of an arrowhead was a hand, open, with a little garnet heart held in it.

  “How are you going to wrap it? Is it going to be a surprise? Will she be surprised?”

  “She’s going to be so surprised.”

  “Do you know how to wrap it, Daddy?”

  “Sure he knows,” said Perry.

  “Sure,” John said. “I’ve got a plan. I can see it all.”

  It was John Nutting’s strength and his weakness, as he had come to know: that seeing a thing as it might be or as he wanted it to be was to him what having a plan meant; that thought and care lavished on the picture of the thing that would come to be was the refining of the plan. What he’d thought of now, what he saw, was a heart, a full heart, a swollen heart, that could be opened and spill its contents—what he had in his heart was his idea. He had found a padded envelope of the kind you put fragile or special things in, that had a red stripe or tab or thread that the addressee was to pull to open. He wanted to somehow cut a heart shape out of this package in such a way that the pull-to-open stripe would run right down the center of the heart.

  “Then see, Mom pulls the string thing, and the stuff inside comes out.”

  They looked at the parts of the project, what he had to put in, not themselves sure about this idea.

  “You’ll see,” John said.

  Inside the heart shape, before he sealed its edges with red tape (the dull brown color of the package was the downer part of the idea, but he couldn’t see painting or coloring it), he was going to put a handful of candy hearts Along with these there was a long narrow strip of paper, folded accordion style, on which he had written these words:

  Come on and TAKE A

  Take another little piece of my heart, now, baby—

  You know you got it, if it makes you feel good

  So what he hoped, or saw, was that when the package was opened the little hearts would spill out, and the long folded strip spring forth a little to be taken hold of and pulled out and read, and the steel pin with the garnet heart appear last shyly among all this show. She’d laugh and she’d see and know. The little hearts were the pastel candy kind with little remarks printed on them in pink. He told the kids that they were called conversation hearts.

  “Oh you kid,” Perry read, from a blue one.

  “They’re candy, right?” asked Lily.

  “Well, sort of,” John said. “I don’t really know how good they are. I don’t remember them being so hot. Not the point, in a way.” Raggedy Ann and Andy had each had, under their rags and hidden within their stuffing, a conversation heart. It said I love you (as he remembered), and it was what animated them, brother and sister, made them live and talk. His own sister’s Raggedy Ann doll was asserted to have one, but there was no way to be certain except to rip open her bosom and find it: his suggestion as to this was rejected.

  “Cutie pie,” read Perry. “Go girl. Get real.”

  He held that one out to Lily, who leaned forward, eyes closed and tongue out like a communicant, that same pious expectation too, and Perry put the heart on her tongue. He and John waited for her reaction. She let it melt, small smile on her face, then crushed it with open mouth. John then remembered the chalky tasteless sweetness.

  “Be mine,” Perry said. “New you. Howzat? Page me.” He put on his Puzzlement face at that one, a comical screw.

  “It means call me,” John said. “Don’t eat them all.”

  “Why not,” said Perry, but this was another heart’s message. He didn’t seem tempted by them. His sister’s reaction had not been enthusiastic. He often used her to test new edibles.

  They’d thought, John and Meg, of getting a car phone: enough emergencies were now possible that it might be justified. Thinking, though, was all they’d done so far. Outside it was now all dark, and the falling snow was mounting without his monitoring its depth and intensity, which seemed to lessen his control of it, which was nil, then and now. If Meg left the meeting at five, she should be home by seven.

  “Home soon,” Perry said, and showed his father the yellow heart that said so.

  [NEXT CHAPTER]

  Soon Trxx
went home with her mother and father and brother, wrapped in a soft blanket Dr. Nxx gave her.

  She ate and slept and cried and made noises. She grew a little every day, and every day she saw new things and touched new things and heard new things. Everything in the world was new to Trxx, including Trxx herself.

  She found out she had fingers and toes and learned to wiggle them. Soon she learned to smile and laugh. She laughed when her brother Pxx made faces at her, and when her mother tickled her, and when her father tossed her in the air and caught her.

  She loved her mother and father and brother, and they loved her too, just the way she was. The hair on her head grew thicker and longer, but she never grew fur. She stayed just as she was when she was born.

  Her mother and father learned to wrap Trxx up carefully in her warm blanket, and when it was cold at night they put her in between them on their bed to keep her warm. But when she learned to crawl she’d get out of her blanket and out from between her sleeping parents, and cry from the cold.

  “If only we could figure out a way to keep this ‘blanket’ stuck on her, like fur,” said Fxx.

  They asked Dr. Nxx what to do. “What she needs is ‘clothes,’” said Dr. Nxx.

  “‘Clothes?’” said Fxx and Qxx together.

  “‘Clothes’ are like a blanket that fits over you and won’t come off. All over. Nice and warm.”

  “All over?” said Qxx. “What about going to the bathroom?”

  “Then you take them off.”

  “Every time?” said Qxx.

  “Not all of them,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry. It’s not as hard as it seems. You’ll get used to it.”

  “And where,” Fxx asked,” do we get these ‘clothes?’”