The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (16 page)

CHAPTER IX

T
HE
E
MERALD
T
HERMODYNAMICAL
H
YPER
-J
UNGLE
L
AW

In Which Tom and Tam Host a Very Boisterous Party in Apartment #7, Play a Game of Red Light, Green Light, and Are Kidnapped by a Baseball Thomas and Tamburlaine played for seven hours, which is the proper number for this sort of thing

It takes a span of seven, at a minimum, to make a new world.

Seven days, seven hours, even seven minutes, if one has had a very good breakfast. Less won't do; you spend the first bit just measuring fabric and trying to find the hammer you had in your hand just a moment ago. And if you go on and on and procrastinate and sleep in weekends, before you know it you've spent a year on one little curlicue on one tiny blue fjord and the whole thing starts to seem less interesting than starting over with a shiny new gas giant.

Don't look at me so suspiciously—you and I make new worlds, too. It is only that our hands are too small to manage seventeen moons at once, or a great red storm that goes on blustering for centuries. We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as
Do Not Take Things That Aren't Yours Unless No One Is Looking
and
Good Things Happen to Good People
and
A Year Is 365 Days
are agreed upon, even when they aren't true, perhaps especially so.

You and I have made a little world here together, a world only we know, with a lovely red door and glinting eyes peeking out from under the geraniums. A secret world all our own inside the one everyone knows about, and a very fine one, at that. A new world is always made when one creature speaks and another listens. There is no gravity in here, but oh, how everything flies!

Thomas Rood managed two worlds in seven hours. We should, frankly, congratulate him on a new land-speed record. The first one was a matter of survival. He didn't mean to do it. No one does, really. It's only that when nothing is as you thought it was, a body has to cobble together a new universe out of the rubbish left over when the old one burst and turned into a wombat. Nothing could be certain anymore. New gravities were necessary, new boiling points, new E's and mc's and squares. Why settle for the second law of thermodynamics? That's the old world's tune. When gramophones dance and girls grow plums like earrings, the reign of the Emerald Thermodynamical Hyper-Jungle Law has come: Everything lives and grows and thickens, nothing decays, nothing fades, nothing ends.

He didn't make his worlds alone, of course. No one does. Moving alone upon the face of the deep is awfully boring.

And lo, in the first hour, Thomas and Tamburlaine went a bit mad with giggling and chocolates liberated from the high cabinet and egging each other on and committed a number of crimes against Apartment #7. Thomas excavated the ancient archaeological site of his closet and unearthed several half-used tubes of oil paint rolled up at the ends like toothpaste. Tam showed him how to use a bit of egg to freshen up the colors. Together, they pushed his tall bookshelf to one side, revealing a fresh, blank patch of easily hideable wall. Tamburlaine rubbed her arm from wrist to shoulder until the dark, polished wood of her real body came up. She squirted out lines of cobalt and vermilion and custard and olive onto her forearm and began to paint, while Thomas scribbled his notes to the furniture with the fervor of a grandfather writing letters to the newspaper editor.

Dear Gertrude (my bedside reading lamp with the green shade and missing pane of glass through which you can see wires):

Please wake up right now this moment and be alive like Blunderbuss and be able to walk and talk and remember all the books you read over my shoulder from the time I was tiny and you seemed as big and bright as the sun. Please like Tamburlaine and I and never pop your bulb again and forgive me for not ever dusting you even though every night when I went to bed I thought you really needed it.

Thomas Michael Rood

Tamburlaine drew her brush upward in a long, graceful, custard-colored stroke, a stroke that if you or I or Thomas had made it, might only have been a stripe on a wall for which we'd have been rightly scolded, but when Tam did it, clearly belonged to a tree whose leaves and trunk would soon catch up with the rest. While she did it, Blunderbuss snuffled around the kitchen until she found the bread-box, whereupon she dove into the dinner rolls headfirst
,
her woolly feet waggling in joy. “Wombats have to fill their bellies! Priority one! An empty belly is an angry belly. You are my very first dinner rolls! I will remember you always and sing songs of your courage!” she cried.

Scratch kicked his long brass legs like a dance-hall girl as Gertrude the Green Lamp clicked on, then off, then on again, rocking from side to side on her squat, round base, then leapt to the floor and bounced madcap round the bedroom, her light flashing on and off, faster and faster, while the gramophone sang:

How 'ya gonna keep 'em, down on farm,

After they've seen Paree?

Thomas ran through the house, writing with his paper propped on the wall, on the dining table, on the floor, on his knee.
Dear Hephaestus, Who Is a Woodstove with One Dented Burner; Dear Ophelia, Who Is a Vase of Five Sort of Wilted Irises; Dear Grandfather Horatio, Who Is a Grandfather Clock!
And Hephaestus roared in patterns of flame and dark, and Ophelia opened and closed her blossoms and bounced along with Gertrude in a foxtrot, and Grandfather Horatio bonged out seventeen o'clock. Tamburlaine looked up from her painting and tilted her head to one side. The apartment quaked with stomping and crowing.

“You only asked them to talk. You didn't give them mouths. They're like Scratch; they talk with the parts they have. Though Gertrude seems to know Morse code.”

The green glass lamp flashed gleefully: long, short, long, long.

Under her hands a chartreuse tree was growing. Its leaves unfurled in ultramarine, boiling hot colors dripping with light.

Thomas looked up at the chandelier in the parlor.

“Will-o'-the-wisp, if you come out today I shall love you until I am dead.”

Thomas wrote to the chandelier. He called her Citrine as he always had. I shall not tell you what he wrote, for some things that pass between a boy and a lighting fixture are secret and strange. He got up onto a ladder and coiled the note around one of the silver flourishes hung with crystal. He waited. His heart felt as though it were bursting and collapsing back and bursting again.

Nothing happened. No will-o'-the-wisp soared up out of the lights and settled on his shoulder. Thomas shook his head. It was the first disappointment of his new world. He tried to reason it out. To invent a rule, for rules give one a little kingship over disappointments. It was not, after all, Thomas's fault if he had run afoul of a Law of the Universe. They weren't posted; he hadn't known.

“I think maybe I can't make new things,” he called out to Tamburlaine, who was shading a stained-glass pinecone in maroon. “Just wake things up. Have you ever made anything new, something that wasn't there before?” And in his heart he thought:
Is this what a troll does? Is this troll magic?

But Tamburlaine did not answer. She was too full of her new trees.

Dear Arabesque, Who Is a Girl Dancing with Orchids in the Hallway Painting …
Thomas began to write. He concentrated so fiercely that he did not see a pair of crystal legs bathed in daffodil-colored light unfold from the ceiling and pirouette down. He did not see the slender, gentle body of teardrop-shaped crystals, nor the hair of silver curling chandelier arms, nor the glowing eyes of round glass bulbs until he turned round to take his new note to the girl in the hallway painting. Thomas stared at Citrine. She stared back. Not a will-o'-the-wisp—alive all the same. She smiled with her glittering glass mouth and swept up Thomas into her arms, spinning him in a crystalline polka round the apartment, grabbing Tamburlaine as they passed the bedroom, clutching her with jeweled fingers, making a clumsy, hopping, lovely three-person step from corner to corner to corner. Scratch leapt along behind them, singing, moving his needle double-quick, back and forth across the record:

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm,

After they've seen Paree?

*   *   *

But then, in the second hour, Thomas was compelled to teach the citizens of his new world a game, for Nicholas and Gwendolyn would not stay away forever. The wild objects of Apartment #7 gathered close round: the green glass lamp and the vase of irises leaned in, the woodstove strained to hear from the kitchen, the draperies swirled open and shut, the grandfather clock put his hands into his best attentive position. The girl in the painting put down her orchids and stood on tiptoe. The chandelier sat cross-legged on the parlor rug. Blunderbuss snoozed, uninterested, her yarn nose twitching.

“Everybody, please, listen, this is very important!” Thomas cried. “We must learn a game, all together. It's a very easy game. It's called Red Light, Green Light.”

The green lamp flashed delightedly.

“Yes, I expect you'll be very good at it, Gertrude! Now, when I say Green Light, we can all do as we like and roll about and pounce and howl. But when I say Red Light, you must freeze, back in your old places, and hold your breath, and not move even a little. Red Light means someone is coming who wouldn't understand why you are all suddenly interested in pouncing, and might take us all to the dump if they found out. Let's try? Red Light!”

The house eagerly leapt to order. They practiced all afternoon, except Blunderbuss, who slept the hours away below Tamburlaine's chartreuse pine, snoring up into the blue needles, each one a tiny rapier glinting under the stars of a faraway place.

In the third hour, Blunderbuss begged Thomas to take her to school.

“In the Land of Wom, we learn by fighting! If you spy a wombat who looks like he might know something you don't, you sneak along behind him while he's looking for grasses to eat and when he thinks he is very safe, you LEAP out and POUNCE on him! You bite his NECK and dig your claws into his RUMP! You hold him down till the things he knows start trying to wiggle out so that at least they can escape your wrath alive. Out of his furry wombat muzzle might shoot snowballs with the formula to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius written in the ice! Papayas with seeds who bear the faces of all the Prime Ministers of Wom, in chronological order! Painted eggs you can crack open and suck out the Code of Hammurabi! Did you know Hammurabi was part wombat? Well, children are ignorant these days. I want to go to this Kingdom of School and fight humans for their know-how! Who knows what I can pummel out of
them?
”

“Nothing,” Thomas begged her. “That's not how it works here. You can't pummel them at all. If I take you tomorrow,
if
I take you, you must stay completely silent. The Reddest of Red Lights! You must stay in my satchel and not come out until it is all over. Promise, Blunderbuss. Or you stay home with Gertrude and her flashing will give you a nasty headache.”

Blunderbuss reared up on her squat black-and-white hind legs. She held up one turquoise paw. “I solemnly swear on the soul of Wattle, the great wombat empress who stood up to the kangaroos and told them what's what. I will stay in your satchel and not make so much as a snort.”

In the fourth hour, Tamburlaine began a new tree to the left of the stained-glass pine, a violently violet willow whose drooping branches sprouted all over with pocket watches. And Thomas got very close to Blunderbuss's woolen ear and said: “You called me a troll.”

“What I see I say, and what I says I seen, I sawed,” nodded the scrap-yarn wombat.

“But I don't look like a troll. I've looked at heaps of pictures of trolls, and they're … they're so-so much prettier than me.”

“A wombat also sees with her nose. And her teeth. You
reek
like a troll and you
taste
like a troll. Don't worry, it's a nice reek. Mossy and muddy and a little like a diamond. In the Land of Wom, we collect reeks like stamps. When I was a bub I had a book with twelve kinds of cockatrice reek in it. Would have knocked you down dead just to turn the page.”

Thomas tried to smell himself, but he only smelled like Thomas to his own nose. Is it true? Would a wombat lie to him? What if she was right?

In the fifth hour, Tamburlaine's third tree sprang up, an applejack tree whose fruit were glassy green flasks sloshing with powerful cider. She worked so fast it made her pant and sweat. The way she stared at the forest on his wall made Thomas shiver. A gaze like that could set a poor unsuspecting wall on fire. He sat back while the apartment thundered around him, creatures running up every which ceiling, laughing and chattering in their many peculiar tongues. The girl in the painting waved at him; he waved back. Though he did not know it, Apartment #7 now looked very like a house in Fairyland. It was nearly an outpost of Fairyland itself, so thickly did it swarm with magic.

In the sixth hour, Thomas Rood cast about for some new thing to enchant. The icebox was too big, really. An icebox come alive was too close to a Yeti to keep in an apartment. The jewelry on his beloved coat seemed like a good prospect, but then he should not have the coat any longer, once the necklaces on its shoulders had minds of their own.

In the depths of his satchel, having waited patiently for its moment, Thomas's baseball stirred.

It rolled forward, pushed open the flap of the satchel, and peeked out, its red stitches gleaming invitingly.
Look at me, Tom,
the ball seemed to whisper.
How much fun I am!
But Tom was considering the virtues of his Sunday suit coming to life and not paying attention where it ought to be paid, thank you very much. But the ball was quite proud. It would not be ignored. It nudged forward again, boldly tumbling out onto the floor where it could not be missed.