Goldenland Past Dark (12 page)

An hour or so later, they made camp in an abandoned barn. Dr. Show claimed it belonged to an acquaintance of his. No one really believed him, but they were too exhausted to argue. Sheets of rain blew in through the wide front doors that none of them could manage to shut. After parking the Cadillac and the jalopy inside, Schoenberg decided that the company should sleep up top, in a hayloft accessible only by a splintery ladder. Al ascended first, carrying a flashlight, and when he called down that it seemed safe enough, if none too clean, the other players scaled the rungs one by one.

Webern held his breath until he reached the very top. When he stepped onto the dry boards above, his knees continued to shake. Even with the flashlight switched on and positioned at the centre of the floor, it was very dark. The sloping planes of the roof hung low above his head; beneath his feet, the floor felt tilted and unstable, with nail heads poking out of the planks. A bat swooped down, squeaking, and he screamed. Vlad and Fydor, who had already unrolled their sleeping bag, murmured something in Russian; one of them chuckled. Nepenthe flopped down on a blanket; she fanned herself with one hand. Then from below, they heard Brunhilde’s voice.

“I will not sleep here, Schoenberg. I will not sleep where animals feed.”

“My dear Brunhilde, I assure you these accommodations are temporary in the extreme.”

“Just the same, I refuse. Pay me what you owe. I want no part of this
Albtraum
, this circus.”

“My lark, please reconsider. You may sleep in the Cadillac, if you like.”

“I will not reconsider. Pay me what you owe. One month’s back salary. The cashbox, if you please.”

The hayloft looked out on the lower part of the barn. Al, Eng, and Nepenthe gathered at the edge to peer down.

“Bernie, come see this,” Nepenthe hissed. Webern shook his head. “Come
on
.”

Webern stepped forward hesitantly. Between two boards, he could see a chink of light. “I’m scared of heights.”

Nepenthe rolled her eyes. From down below, he heard the Cadillac door open, then the sound of metal against metal—tinny and faint.

“One dime? This is all you have saved?”

“Ah. Er, if you’ll allow me to—I have some small bills, I believe—perhaps a personal cheque?”

The ladder creaked. After a long moment, Brunhilde hefted herself up to the hayloft floor. She strode up to the edge, tossed her silk pillow on the ground, and lowered herself onto it with grave dignity. She ran her fingers through her beard.

Webern unfolded his sleeping bag in one corner of the hayloft, as far as he could get from the ladder and the edge. Husks of grain crunched beneath him as he curled up. After a moment, Al switched off the flashlight. The others began to breathe slowly and deeply—Al started to snore. Webern rolled over. A small leak from the ceiling dripped onto his nose. He heard cautious footsteps, and Nepenthe’s rough hand touched his.

“Some digs, huh?” Her long curls brushed his face. He could hardly see her in the darkness. “Hey. I’m sorry you’re afraid of heights.”

“It’s okay.”

“And I’m sorry Dr. Show made you crash that thing into a tree.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re just such a dope sometimes.”

“I thought it was criminal insanity.”

“That, too. Plus paranoia, acrophobia, teratophilia, an Oedipal complex . . .”

“What’s teratophilia?”

“Trust me, I’ve done my research, and you have it.” She poked his chest. “You’ve got a whole system of pathologies. It’ll take years to sort them all out.”

Webern ran his finger in the grooves between the scales on her wrist. “Lots of years?”

Nepenthe kissed him on the forehead. “Consider yourself involuntarily committed.”

She padded back to her blanket. Webern savoured the warm feeling that lingered where her lips had touched him. But he still couldn’t get to sleep properly. Every time he started to doze off, he jerked awake again, convinced that he was falling.

In reality, Webern hadn’t fallen since his sixth birthday, the day of his accident, when he had climbed up into his new treehouse and refused to come down again until the magician arrived. Up in the tree, Webern had stared down, owlish and blinking through his round, thick eyeglasses, while in the yard below his mother folded card tables, setting each one with brightly coloured napkins and orange paper plates. Webern wore a pink dress shirt that day, as well as blue velveteen shorts and a yellow conical party hat. His eyes were red from crying.

Webern had been suffering ever since he started first grade, some weeks earlier. He’d gone in eagerly, with a new bow tie and an apple for the teacher, and he’d come out, bedraggled and speechless, the victim of a violent funhouse. Webern didn’t like the loud jangling bells, the dark catacombs of the coatroom, or the grime that collected under his nails by the day’s end—crayon wax and eraser dust. He hated the little boys, who sharpened their pencils into spears and threw them at his neck, and the little girls, who snared him in their jump ropes and tittered behind the backs of their hands. He hated story time because, sitting in a circle with the other children, he couldn’t get up close to the picture book illustrations the way he could at home with his mother, and he hated lunch—cold tater tots and limp green beans and sloppy joes that seemed to bleed when he bit into them. But, above all else, he hated recess. That first day on the playground, he fell down and scraped his knee on the rough asphalt. When, much to his surprise, no one rushed to pick him up, he wiped his eyes and looked into his stinging wound. In it, little grains of sand, stone, and glass sparkled, and for a terrifying moment, Webern imagined that he’d exposed a second skin, inhuman, metallic, and glittering, just beneath his own.

Webern missed waking up in his empty house and padding through hallways already warm with late morning light. He missed wearing his red robe and slippers, and napping in the afternoons. Most of all, he missed sitting in the kitchen and telling his mother about his dreams. But he couldn’t find a way to bring them up at now-crowded breakfasts, with his father rustling through the newspaper, his mother swaying at the sizzling stove, and his sisters, holding hands, cackling at private jokes, and smashing their knees into the table’s underside whenever anything displeased them.

So Webern tried to hold onto his dreams all day long. But it wasn’t easy. Despite his best efforts, the dreams grew thin and brittle with little holes in them, like peppermints sucked for too long, and most days, by mid-afternoon, Webern had begun to wonder if he’d ever dreamed at all. The sandcastle cities, the marshmallow pillows, the smiling man in the moon—these dreamscapes dissolved and melted into one another till they left nothing but shiny rainbow puddles, pooled on the floor of his mind. So Webern started keeping his dreams to himself, though he could already see the sadness growing in his mother’s eyes.

Webern had seen the magician advertised on a poster tacked to the wall of the grocery store. Amidst a flurry of business cards and clipped coupons for haircuts and shoe repair stores, the blood red letters of his sign stood out. “WOTAN THE IRASCIBLE,” it screamed. “ILLUSIONIST FOR HIRE.” In smaller letters, the poster alluded to the magician’s dark powers, and his availability for weddings, birthdays, and other family gatherings. But Webern, who was just learning to read, didn’t trouble himself with these superfluous details. His eyes lingered on the portrait that gazed out of the glossy paper with hooded eyes. The magician, a tall gaunt man with hair black as ink, held a thin black wand with an inch of white at its tip like ash on a cigarette. On his head, he wore a top hat, so tall and black it seemed to be concealing something. Webern stared at this picture for a long time, puzzling over a feeling he couldn’t quite articulate. Somehow, this somber, mustachioed gentleman seemed to know the answers to lonesome questions Webern was just starting to ask himself.

When Webern begged for the magician to perform at his birthday party, his mother enthusiastically agreed, and not just because her love for Webern was big enough to burst a smaller heart. No; she knew that Webern didn’t want to have a party in the first place, and she hoped that Wotan could sweeten the bitter medicine, at least a little.

Shirley understood her son’s dislike of parties. When she had been a child herself, she had also preferred afternoons alone, reading fairy tales or helping her mother out in the kitchen, and it seemed to her that much of what had happened since those peaceful days ended had been a very big mistake. One part of her wanted to shelter Webern forever, to hide him away from the world like a little prince in a tower. But the other part of her suspected that it was her duty to nudge him along. It was this part of Shirley that guided her hand as she addressed the small, bright invitations, as she squeezed ribbons of frosting from a tube, and as she bought bunches of balloons that tugged and bumped at the ends of their strings, trying to float away.

Webern had gone along with all of this, grudgingly but without complaint, until the day of the party when Shirley, arranging candles on his cake, had looked out of the kitchen window to see the rope ladder of her son’s new treehouse slither up into the high branches of the backyard oak and disappear.

The treehouse was a gift from Webern’s father, Raymond, who’d built it loudly and stubbornly, without consulting anyone. A couple of weeks earlier, on a Saturday afternoon, he had declared that he was heading out to run a few errands, and Webern and Shirley had both looked up in surprise. Raymond never ran errands. He was a burly, slouching man, with skin leathery-rough as a catcher’s mitt, and a pugnacious underbite; except for his timid, darting eyes, he looked like a retired prizefighter. Raymond needed his solitude, so he stayed at home, preferably by himself, whenever possible. He spent most weekends stretched out on the couch with a gin and tonic in his red lumberjack’s hand, staring at a spot on the wallpaper just to the left of the picture window. Sometimes he let out a short, wild cry, like the unexpected squawk of a seagull. On weekends, if Webern ran out into the living room to look for a lost toy or a storybook, his mother always cautioned, “Don’t disturb your father. He’s thinking.”

“Thinking about what?” Webern once asked. His mother hesitated.

“The war, I suppose.”

Perhaps that afternoon in the hardware store, Raymond was thinking of the war again, because he returned home with enough planks, nails, and shingles to build a fortress.

“The boy needs some place to go,” he explained over dinner, “to get away from this house full of women.”

Willow and Billow smashed their knees into the table’s underside. The mashed potatoes jumped. The Jell-O salad trembled.

The first week after the treehouse was finished, Webern only climbed up in it once, to hang the gingham curtains that his mother had picked out for the windows. His father seemed disgusted, but Webern didn’t care. The treehouse scared him. Webern had expected it to look more like a bird’s nest, with soft feathered walls that would hold him gently in the air, like a cupped hand. This treehouse, square and heavy with a hole in the floor, more closely resembled a cardboard box, which might unceremoniously dump him out at any moment. On the morning of the party, though, it seemed to be his only refuge.

Up in the treehouse, yellow, orange, and green light streamed in the open windows, filtered through changing leaves. Webern sat Indian-style on the floor, carefully peeling the wrapper from one of his birthday cupcakes. He took a bite and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to savour it, before he swallowed. He put the rest of the cupcake back in its paper skin. He might have to stay up here a long time—better ration out supplies.

Webern licked pink icing off his fingers, then dared himself to peek out one of the windows. Although he knew he could fall, he could also imagine climbing out the window and walking around at this height, as if on a pair of enormous stilts. He was bracing himself for the wobbly bliss of vertigo when he looked up from his cupcake and realized that he wasn’t alone. A little boy with golden hair sat opposite him, smiling impishly. He wore lederhosen, knee socks, and heavy German shoes. Although Webern hadn’t seen him for exactly two years, he recognized him right away.

“Wags Verder!” Webern gasped.

“At your service,” said the intruder. He tipped his leather cap. “Happy birthday, by the way.” He sized Webern up. “You’re growing up fast.”

“But you’re almost as big as me,” said Webern. Wags was; looking at him was like looking into a magic mirror. His gold hair glinted in the sunshine. “How did you get so big?”

“Trick of the light, pal, trick of the light.” Wags winked. “Look out that window and you’ll see what I mean.”

Webern reached for the curtain, then hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Don’t be a ’fraidy cat.”

Sucking in his breath, Webern pulled back the gingham curtain and peered outside. Down below, Mom had finished setting up the card tables. Party favours—paper hats, kazoos, and Chinese finger traps—waited on each folding chair for the guests. A glass pitcher of pink lemonade glistened in the centre of one tabletop; on another, a lone red tulip drooped in a vase. From Webern’s perch in the treehouse, it all looked tiny—a world in miniature. The brightly coloured paper plates resembled bingo chips, and, squinting his eyes a little, Webern could see confetti sprinkled here and there on the tablecloths, as finely ground as fairy dust.