The Future Is Blue, Page 30

  The monster at the piano began to play a mournful torch song. He fixed his moony headlamp-eyes on Olive and sang in a gorgeous tenor: I never whiffled, I never; and it weren’t even brillig at all. Nobody gave me no chance to be beamish; I could’ve been someone, if I’ d been born small…

  The White Queen frowned at her knitting. “That’s Edward. He’s rather a war hero, don’t you know? He lost his right foot at the Battle of Tulgey Wood, see?” Olive leaned forward—the Jabberwock worked the pedals of his pianoforte with only one crocodile-foot. The other was wrapped in gauze and seeping. The White Queen sighed like a tea kettle boiling. “He’s going to lose the other one in an hour, poor chap.”

  Olive blinked. “What? What do you mean he’s going to lose his other one? How do you know?”

  Edward belted out: You can take a Wock’s head but you can’t make him crawl! He stopped, leaned his long, whiskered snout over the footlights into the audience, and whispered: “On account of my brain’s being in my tail, yeah? Joke’s on you, O Frabjous Brat!”

  “It’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly.

  “Oh!” Olive whispered excitedly. “I know this part! Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, right?”

  “Will you please be quiet?” growled the striped cat. “Talking during performance is a biting offense.”

  The White Queen blushed pinkly. She reached down into the knitting basket at her feet and drew out a toasted crumpet spread generously with raspberry jam. She brushed a bit of wool fluff off of it and offered it to Olive.

  “I have learned a few lessons since I was deposed,” she said softly, and with such a tender sadness. “Very occasionally, it costs one nothing to bend the rules.”

  Dear Me! A Human child!

  Alice stares down at her four neat quails adrift in their sea of golden sauce.

  “You can’t be serious,” Peter hisses at her. “This is…this is unkind, Alice. Monstrous, in fact. Why are you doing this to me? What purpose is there in it?”

  “I’m not doing any little thing to you, young man. Now, stop it. You needn’t pretend. What was Hook like, really? I always wondered if his stump pained him, at night, in the cold of the sea air.”

  “For Christ’s sake, this is madness. You ought to be locked up, not me.”

  Alice’s face goes dark and furious and sour.

  “Say that to me again, boy. Say it, and I’ ll whip you like the child you are, right here in this lovely restaurant. Don’t think I can’t. I raised three sons and a husband, you know.”

  Peter blanches. He feels his blood rebel, not knowing whether to flood his cheeks or flee them. He begins a deep study of his beef. After a time, Alice softens.

  “I am sorry—it’s a wonder how many times I’ve said it in such a short while! But I am, I am sorry, Peter, I simply assumed. It was only natural, to my mind. Only logic. I only thought…if for me, then for you. Goose and gander and all that rot. Oh, I never told anyone—my God, how could anyone be told? How could I even begin? But you, you of all people! The moment you introduced yourself I thought that we had veered toward this, careened toward it, that we would converge upon it long before dessert, and at last, I would know someone like me, and you would know someone like you, and what peace we should have then, at the end of it all. Peace, and something nice with butterscotch.”

  “Please. You mock me, Mrs. Hargreaves.”

  “I do not, Mr. Davies. I make you my confession. In the summer of 1862, something rather astonishing happened to me. I was ten years old. And naturally, when it was all done, I ran at full pelt to tell my best friend all about it just as soon as I could. To my eternal fault, in those days, my best friend was a mathematics professor with a rather large nose and a rather large anxiety complex and an interest in writing.”

  The beef tastes like nothing at all. The wine tastes like less than that. He gives up. “It was real,” he says flatly.

  “Well, of course it was. Who could make up such a thing?”

  Everything’s Got a Moral

  The egg brought Olive another indigo martini.

  “From the fellow onstage,” the bartender whispered. “He was very insistent that it arrive as he was performing, not before or beside or behind.”

  The fellow onstage was an old-ish man in muttonchops holding an improbably large lavender top hat with the size-card still stuck in it. He watched the crowd solemnly as he drew object after object after object out of the hat: a croquet ball stained with blood, a pocket watch with a bayonet thrust through the fob, a silver tea-tray with a great, unhappy boot-print on it.

  “Deposed?” Olive said to the White Queen, who went on calmly with her knitting. “But you’re the White Queen! Shouldn’t you be off Queening about with the other Queens?”

  “I wasn’t red, so I wasn’t needed,” she sighed. “That’s what they said. There were four of us once. The perfect number for bridge. The Red Queen, the White Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and…” The White Queen suddenly clammed up, shaking her head in distress.

  “The Other One,” the striped cat purred. “We aren’t allowed to say her name. The Queens have ears. Hush hush.”

  “She kicked down the Queen of Hearts’ horrid cards and shook the Red Queen so hard she nearly broke her neck—more’s the pity she didn’t finish the job. Everything was going to be all right, you know. With the Other One here to keep those scarlet women in line.”

  The cat licked his paws. “I met her. She was rather thick, if you ask me. And she kept going on about herself, which I think is very rude, when you’re a guest.”

  “But you knew it wouldn’t be all right,” said Olive, who had a little brother, and therefore was immune to distraction. “Because of how you live backwards.”

  “Yes, yes! What a clever girl! I knew, but no one listens to me because I’m always screaming about one thing or another—but you would scream, too, if you remembered the whole future of the world until Judgment Day and past it! You’d scream and scream and never stop! I knew she’d vanish like a shawl in the wind and she did and just as soon as she did, the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts would decide Wonderland needed taking in hand. Needed one crown. We were all conscripted. My Lily died on the Croquet Grounds. I wish I had. I wish…I wish a lot of things. The Other One came back, of course, nothing only happens once in Wonderland. But as soon as she was gone again, those red ladies holed up in their castles and started building their armies once more. We are not at war now, my child, but we soon shall be. Now, we simply hold our breaths and wait.”

  “Something like that happened in my world, too,” Olive said softly. “Is happening. Germany and Russia and America and…well, everyone, I suppose.”

  “The Tumtum Club is the only place the Looking Glass Creatures are allowed to be mad anymore.” The White Queen sighed. “Outside, we have to report for duty at dawn. In here, the Hatter can pull his heart out of his hat.”

  The gorgeous butterfly slipped out of the curtain again to master further ceremonies, twirling on her tiny black feet in a sudden cloud of stage smoke. She peered into the audience as though she were speaking to each of them in particular, as though what she said were more important than anything that had ever happened to them, and the whole of the universe waited upon their answering her.

  I am young, little darlings, the Butterfly crooned

  My wings have become very bright

  The larva I was drowned inside my cocoon

  Growing up really is such a fright!

  I hardly remember the old mushroom now

  I liked hookahs, I think, and fresh dew

  Yet I’ll still have my answer, I do not care how:

  Who Are You?

  Something knocked into their toadstool table and toppled Olive’s drink. She tried to keep mum for the sake of the Hatter and shout indignantly at the same time, which is impossible, but she tried anyway.

  The marble raven capital blinked up at her.

  “Come on, then,” he cawed. “This is
our five-minute call. We’re on, Olive, old girl.”

  Living Backwards

  The trio of musicians wind down. The lights are dim now. The restaurant nearly empty, nearly shut. Peter and Alice toy with the notion of eating their slices of plum-cake awash with double cream, but neither can fully commit to it. They speak of Wonderland, of cabbages and kings, of riddles and chess and what sort of tea could be got in the wilds. It is pleasant, there is a joy in it, but it is unreal. It is like listening to someone try to tell you the plot of a radio play you missed. Peter feels a chill. Perhaps another cold coming on.

  “I want to believe you,” he says.

  “Clap your hands and give it a go. Or decide I’m a barmy old woman and go on with your life. It won’t change what I know. Oh, Peter, how disappointing for us both. You thought we were the same. I thought we were. But Alice in Wonderland could never take me from myself, because it was myself, it always was. We’re both the victims of burglars, dastardly fellows who stove in our windows and bashed up our houses. But my robber only took the silver. Yours took the lot. Of course, Charles got it half wrong and put a great lot of maths in to amuse himself; and perhaps if I’d been the one to write it, I wouldn’t have to sell my first editions to keep the lights on in my house; but losing Wonderland didn’t ruin me. Losing…” and then she cannot continue. She grips her beer glass like it can save her, but it will not. It never has saved anyone. “…my boys…all my pretty boys…”

  “My brothers, too,” Peter whispers. There is nothing more to say than that, than that they are people of a certain era, and people of a certain era know an emptiness in the world, a place where something precious was cut out and never replaced.

  “Coffee?” asks the waiter.

  “Tea,” they answer.

  “What I don’t understand,” Peter ventures finally, “is what you’re doing here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If it was all real, why don’t you go back? When the lights have gone out and…your boys have gone…why stay here, in this dreadful world?”

  “I never went on purpose. It just happened. I saw a white rabbit one day. I touched a looking glass. I never decided to go. It decided to take me. It’s never decided since. Wonderland is like my son, my last son. It’s just so awfully awkward for him to see me the way I’ve ended up, it avoids me as much as it possibly can.”

  “I suppose I should scour the countryside for bunnies and mirrors,” Peter laughs despite himself.

  “I suppose I should,” Alice giggles, and for a moment she is that child on the cover of a million novels, the English Girl, rosy and devious and brilliant. The check appears as if by magic, and Peter pays it, as good as his word. Alice stands and the waiter brings their coats. “No, Peter, it’s best as it is. Whatever would I say to the White Queen now? Give me my bloody damned jam, you old cow? I gave up weeping for my lost kingdom years ago. I made my own, and if it crumbled, well, all kingdoms do. The world’s not so dreadful, my dear. It is dreadful, of course, but only most of the time. Sometimes it rather outdoes itself. Gives us a scene so improbable no one would dare to put it in a book, for who would believe in such a chance meeting between two such people, such a splendid supper, such an unlikely moment in the great pool of moments in which we all swim?” She kisses his cheek. She holds her lips against him for a long time. When she pulls away, there is a thimble in his hand. “Oh, goodness,” Alice says with a shine in her blue eyes. “What a lot of rubbish old ladies have in their bags!”

  They walk arm in arm out into the New York street. People shove and holler by. The lights spangle and reflect in the hot concrete. The air smells like rotting vegetables and steel and fresh baking rolls and summer pollen. Alice stops him on the curb before he can cross the road.

  “Peter, darling, listen to me. You must listen. You’ve got to answer the Caterpillar’s question—you’ve got to find an answer, or else you’ll never find your way. I never could, not until now, not until this very night, but you must. It’s the only question there is.”

  “I can’t, Alice. I want to.”

  Alice throws her arms round his neck. “I like you better, Peter. Ever so much better than him. Peter Pan was always such an awful shit, you know.”

  They start across the long rope of the street, but being English and unaccustomed to traffic, they do not see the streetcar hurtling toward them, painted white for the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Peter hears the bell and leaps back, hauling Alice roughly along with him, barely missing being crushed against the headlamps. When he collects himself, he turns to ask if she’s all right, if he didn’t hurt her too much, if the shock has ruffled her so that they need another drink to steady them.

  There is no one beside him. His arm is empty.

  “Alice?” Peter calls into the darkness. But no answer comes.

  London Is the capital of Paris, and Paris Is the capital of rome

  Olive stood on the stage of the Tumtum Club in the brash glare of the spotlight. She could barely make out all the glittering scales and claws and furs and shining eyeballs of the Looking Glass Creatures in the audience.

  “Go on,” hissed the marble raven. “I’m not doing this alone. You do your bit, then I’ll do mine. Mine’s better, obviously, so I’ll close.”

  “My bit? I haven’t got a bit! I didn’t even sing in the school concert!”

  “Do something! You’re sure to, if you stand there long enough!”

  Olive felt like her heart was dribbling out of her mouth. Everyone just kept looking at her. No one had ever looked at her for so long. Certainly not Father Dear or Darling Mother who ignored her benignly, not Little George who was more interested in painting the sheep, not the Other One, who seemed never to notice her until they collided in the hall. She could hardly bear it. What could she possibly do to impress these aliens out of her own bookshelf? In the book, Alice always had something clever to say, some bit of wordplay or a really swell pun. Olive could never be an Alice. She wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t endearing enough. She wasn’t anyone enough.

  Really, she only had one choice. She’d only ever practiced one thing long enough to get really good at it.

  “It’s…ahem…it’s dreadful here,” Olive complained. Her voice shook. Everyone liked the pig screaming about its mother. Would they understand her talent? “Even the toadstools and the cocktails are depressed. There’s only one pub and you can’t even play darts here. Alice got to meet a Unicorn and dance with Dodos and learn something about herself on her holiday.” A great gasp ripped through the crowd. A tiger lily burst into tears. The White Queen looked like she might faint.

  “It’s not allowed!” the chess piece whispered. The cat grinned and began, slowly, to disappear.

  Olive pressed on. “But what do I get? The saddest country I’ve ever seen! If any of you so much as breathe wrong, the government passes out from the scandal of it. I can’t even pronounce half of the stuff the Jabberwock says! A more cramped and dreary place I’ve never dreamed of. It’s clear no one ever planned nor built Wonderland so much as as piled it up and gave up on it several times. Somebody obviously thought there was nothing so splendid in the world as Victorian allegory and crammed it in anywhere it would fit, and rather a lot of places it wouldn’t. The martinis aren’t even close to dry. How do you even have electricity? And the local politics are appalling, I’ll tell you that for free. Stuff all Queens, I say! Except Elizabeth, she’s all right.”

  Olive bowed, then curtseyed, then settled on something halfway between. A smattering of uncertain applause started up, growing stronger as the Looking Glass Creatures recovered from their shock. The smattering became a thundering, became a roar.

  The raven hopped up into the spotlight to soak up a bit of adoration for himself. He coughed and shook his stone feathers. The audience quieted, leaned forward, eager, ready for more—so ready they did not hear the thumping outside, or the terrified squeak of the Dormouse in his teapot armour.

  “Ho
w,” said the marble corvid, “is a raven like a writing desk?”

  “It’s a raid!” a Dodo shrieked from the back of the Tumtum Club.

  The club fell apart into madness as playing cards flooded in from all sides, grabbing at the collars of egg and man alike, shouting orders, taking down names. Looking Glass Creatures bolted, down rabbit holes and up through the mossy rafters, behind the posters advertising THE CHESHIRE CIRCUS and MISS MARY ANN SINGS THE BLUES. Olive froze. She saw the turtle who’d sung so beautifully being dragged off by a pair of deuces. A Knave of Clubs swung his rifle into the scaly ankle of Edward, the poor Jabberwock, who roared in anguish. Tears shone on Olive’s cheeks in the footlights. But she couldn’t move. The sound of the raid slashed at her ears horribly.

  “We both devour humans, piece by piece,” the raven finished his riddle into the din, but no one heard him.

  Someone gripped Olive’s arm.

  “Come,” said the White Queen. “I’ll take you with a pleasure. Twopence a week, and always jam to-day.”

  “Come where?”

  “Where you were always going, where you have already been. Where we are already friends, where we have already fought long and hard together, where we have sat upon the field of battle in one another’s arms and looked out over a free Wonderland. Where everything is as it was before the war, before our world split in two, before the Other One, before anything hurt.”

  “Is that really what’s going to happen?”

  “No. It’s impossible. But I believe it anyway. It’s the only way I can bear to face breakfast.”

  Olive glanced offstage. There was a flash of light there, something reflecting in all the flotsam of the theatre. A pane of glass from some lonely window. And for a moment, Olive thought she could see, on the other side of the glass, Darling Mother in the parlour, asleep with Little George in her arms, a nearly empty bottle of gin on the end table and rain still pouring down outside. The shadows of the raindrops looked like black weeping on her mother’s face. Everything as it was. Before. Before anything hurt. Could such a thing ever be?