On the Wing (16 page)

“Huh?”

“Here's your sandwich.”

“Oh. Yeah. Great.”

“You'd better be on your way before dark.”

“On my way?”

“That's right.”

“I was hoping—”

“Of course you were,” he said. “You were hoping that you'd get to stay here for the night. You were hoping that after the missus and I fell asleep you'd manage to get a little—”

With the thumb and index finger of his left hand he formed a ring torus, and then he began poking the index finger of his right hand into it repeatedly, whistling wetly with each poke.

“Sir, I—”

“Let me give you some advice, kid: take the sandwich and make a graceful exit.”

Reluctantly, I did.

Chapter 14

Retrospective Manifestations

WE HAD BEEN DANCING, and though we were now stretched out in bed we were still flushed with the pleasure of dancing. After an uneventful day of driving, we had showered, changed, eaten dinner, and then chanced upon a bar with one of those bands that seems to be able to cover every popular song in every genre from the last several decades. Now we were lying in the luxury of a queen-size bed apiece. I was luxuriating in mine. Albertine was luxuriating in hers. She was reading, carelessly, from a brochure about Blunderhaven, a mansion on an island in the Ohio River that we were thinking of visiting the next morning.

“‘Blunderhaven,'” she read, “‘is a showcase of priceless historical relics and objets d'art, blah, blah, a gateway to the past, blahbitty blah, antique weapons, household items, old clothing, farm implements, blah, blah, objects of yesteryear that now strike us with their quaintness.'”

She paused.

Breathlessly, I asked, “Why have you stopped, my darling? The tension has begun to mount.”

“I was just wondering—oh, never mind.” She took up the brochure again. “‘Your enchanting day at Blunderhaven begins with a ride in a replica of a riverboat from days gone by.'”

She paused again.

I waited for a while. Then I asked, “How long does this replica ride last?”

“Twenty minutes,” she said distantly.

“Let's say that twenty minutes have passed,” I suggested. “We've disembarked. We're greeted by a docent or interpreter in period garb. What has she got to say?”

“‘Welcome to Blunderhaven, a time capsule of bygone days and a monument to folly.'”

“‘A monument to folly'?”

“That's what the brochure says, and I would expect the interpreter to stick to the script.”

“Do I hear a little testiness in your voice?”

“Maybe.”

“I suppose repeating the same script day after day would make an interpreter a bit testy sometimes. Please go on, though.”

“‘Nathaniel Hobson, self-styled Lord of Blunderhaven, was his own best friend and his own worst enemy, self-made and self-destroyed, worshiped and reviled, admired and ridiculed.'”

“Sounds like an interesting guy.”

“‘Although he rose from obscure beginnings to become one of the wealthiest men in western Virginia, his greed made him the compliant dupe of sharpsters and mountebanks, and he dissipated his entire fortune in pursuit of ever greater riches, backing every phantasmagorical scheme that was dangled before his goggling eyes, blah, blah, blah.'”

“He should have taken the sandwich and made a graceful exit,” I commented, more to myself than to her.

She tossed the brochure aside.

“Am I to take it that the interpreter has quit and run off to Ohio with the riverboat captain?” I asked.

“The interpreter wants to know about those dark-haired girls who keep popping up in these memories of yours.”

“They are you,” I said.

“Oh, goodie,” she said, abandoning the luxury of her own individual queen-size bed to join me in mine. “Now, in what sense do you mean that?”

“In what sense do I mean what?”

“I mean, do you mean that after we met you decided that our paths had crossed many times before in real life, in truth, in actual experience?”

“I—”

“Or do you mean that sometime after we met you came to believe that you had seen me many times before, that the dark-haired girl who had appeared so tantalizingly from time to time throughout your past must have been me?”

“No, I—”

“Or do you mean that, when we met, you became the compliant dupe of Mnemosyne, who played the trick of replacing your memories of all those other, earlier, dark-haired beauties with memories of me?”

“That's—”

“Or do you mean that now, in the telling, as a narrative device, a way to please, amuse, and seduce me, you are systematically placing dark-haired distractions in the scenes that you read to me?”

“Well—”

“Or do you mean that before you met me you saw many dark-haired girls that you desired and that I was merely the one you finally managed to seduce and snare? (You'd better say no to that one.)”

“Yes—”

“Yes?”

“I had to stop you somehow.”

“Oh.”

“They are there, those dark-haired girls, because they are retrospective manifestations of you.”

“Retrospective manifestations.”

“It's a technical term.”

“I figured.”

“I'll explain.”

“Make me swoon.”

“During my time in Corosso, I sometimes joined the paleontology group on their sallies into the desert, passing the time reading Tesla's
My Inventions
in the shade of an outcropping of rock while they learned how to use a pretended interest in fossils as a cover for espionage. The desert is a good place for memorization, so I can quote Tesla on manifestations, word for word.”

“Mm?”

“Ready?”

“Shoot.”

“‘I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limitations of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes … and so I began to travel—of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys—see new places, cities, and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.'”

“Simplify, simplify,” she muttered, her eyes having taken on the glazed look of adoration with which she favors me nearly nightly.

“When I met you,” I explained, “I realized that something had been missing in my life for all the years before I met you, though I hadn't felt the lack, and having met you I realized that what had been missing was you. When I began the methodical process of recollection that underlies my memoirs, my systematic cerebral excursions to bygone days, I felt the lack of you because I now knew what I had been missing back then, and I suffered for it as I never had the first time around. However, memory and imagination came to my aid, inserting retrospective manifestations of you here and there, and those are the dark-haired girls who—”

Reader, she snored.

Chapter 15

Held for Ransom

The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that the castle was there.

Franz Kafka,
The Castle

WHENEVER I RECALL this journey that I'm recounting for you, when I take the trip again in my mind, it seems to be a journey of a thousand mistakes. As Lao-Tzu probably would have said if he'd thought of it, the journey of a thousand mistakes begins with a single misstep, and each of the thousand subsequent missteps can begin a journey of a thousand more.

“I think I made a misstep,” I confessed to
Spirit.

“You've been riding, not walking, so that is literally impossible,” she pointed out pedantically, not at all in the chummy, inquisitive, and speculative style of Mr. MacPherson.

“I mean that I must have made a wrong turn,” I said.

“Another wrong turn, you mean,” she said smugly.

“Yes,” I admitted irritably, “another wrong turn.”

“Volumes could be written on the wrong turn as a metaphor for the human condition,” she said. “Maybe they have been. You really ought to check. Perhaps when you get to the Faustroll Institute you could propose that as your thesis topic, if the Faustroll Institute requires a thesis. Does it?”

“How should I know?” I snapped. “I don't even know whether I'll ever get there. This isn't a journey—it's a disaster.”

“I have an idea,” she said, suddenly cheerier.

“What's that? Get a map?”

“No. No, I don't want you to do that. I want you to persist in your folly, fool.”

“Thanks for the endorsement.”

“What I want you to do is redefine the wrong turn.”

“Redefine the wrong turn? What are you talking about?”

“Change your thinking. Change the way you decide what is a wrong turn and what is a right turn.”

“How?”

“You set out to travel to New Mexico, right?”

“Right.”

“But you also set out to have an adventure, right?”

“Right.”

“So, any turn that puts you on the road to New Mexico is a right turn.”

“Right.”

“And any turn that puts you on the road to adventure is also a right turn.”

“Hmmm.”

“A turn that puts you on the road that leads to New Mexico
and
to adventure is doubly right, but a turn that leads to one or the other can't really be considered wrong.”

“Gee, when you put it that way—”

“In order to be a wrong turn, a turn would have to lead you away from New Mexico
and
away from adventure.”

“Then I haven't really made any wrong turns at all.”

“Not yet.”

*   *   *

BUOYED by
Spirit
's redefinition of a wrong turn, I went on happily, making turns and choosing routes with new confidence, almost insouciance, until, at that crepuscular hour when my stomach began to tell me that the day's traveling should be brought to an end, I found myself in a place where the landscape seemed vertically exaggerated, stretched in the upward direction, as if a mathematical function had been applied to all its surfaces, exaggerating them along the
y
axis. The hills that I had been rolling through had become jagged peaks, the gentle winding road now clung precariously to the edge of a precipice, and there was something that seemed so unlikely that I thought it must be an illusion: at a turning a vista opened before me and I seemed to see, atop one of the peaks, a castle. It was veiled in mist and twilight, so I couldn't be certain, but I seemed to see a castle up there.

I stopped, removed my goggles, and rubbed my eyes. I blinked in the direction of the possible castle, half expecting it to disappear, but found that it was still there, looming in the mist above me, dark, cylindrical, crenelated, and threatening. At that moment it might have been wise to turn back, retrace my steps, and find an alternative route, but I was a headstrong boy on an adventure, and turning back would not have been in keeping with the new definition of wrong turns and right turns. A road that wound toward a castle seemed very likely to lead to adventure even if it wasn't likely to lead to New Mexico, and so I pressed on, making progress of a sort, climbing a little higher with each bend in the road, drawing a little nearer to the castle that now and then made a coy appearance through an opening in the tall pines.

Eventually, the road ended in a turnaround. There I left
Spirit
and began to climb a footpath that seemed as if it must lead to the castle.

After a long hike, I came to a small inn. Seeing the warm, inviting light through the windows of the inn, I remembered that I was tired and hungry. I decided to pause in my climb to the castle to have some dinner, perhaps to stay the night.

Entering, I found the front room of the inn, its dining room, empty of other travelers. I sat at a table. A waitress wearing a name tag that identified her as Frieda bustled into the room. She seemed not to notice me. Not at all. She put some linens into a cupboard, straightened them to her satisfaction, and bustled out. She bustled back in with a pair of candelabra. I cleared my throat. She still didn't notice me. I got up and walked around the room, trying the view from various windows, hoping that a boy in motion might be more noticeable, but still she seemed not to see me. Having lit the candles in the candelabra, she bustled out again. Shortly, she bustled back, carrying a load of plates. I refused to go unnoticed any longer. I spoke. “Frieda?” I said.

She dropped the load of plates and shouted, “Oh, my God in heaven!”

“I'm sorry,” I said, squatting to help her pick up the pieces.

“Why did you sneak up on me like that? You scared the life out of me.”

“I've been here,” I said. “You didn't notice me.”

“That's not my fault,” she said. “You're not especially noticeable.”

“I'm flying to New Mexico,” I said, in an attempt to make myself more noticeable.

“That's ridiculous,” she said.

“Honest,” I said. “I really am flying—”

Something kept me from saying more. Frieda was on her hands and knees, making a pile of broken crockery, and I could see down the front of her dress, see the curve of her large breasts. The sight of her breasts, and the position that we were both in, brought a wave of nostalgia, because it reminded me of the crush I had had on Mrs. Jerrold, who lived across the street from my family home in Babbington, reminded me of the schemes I had hatched to visit Mrs. Jerrold, to get near her, and reminded me in particular of a rainy day when I had been playing marbles with her little boy, Roger Junior, in a ring of string that I had made on her living room carpet, and during my play had discovered a tape recorder under her sofa, which discovery prompted Mrs. Jerrold to get down on all fours to see for herself, which allowed me to sneak a peek down the front of her shirtwaist dress, which allowed me to see the curve of her breasts.