I don't believe in the “collective unconscious,” not in the Jungian way I've seen it used. But I do believe that it is in large part through shared stories that communities create themselves and bind themselves together.
It begins with the way we establish our identity, which is intimately tied to our discovery of causality. All of nature relies on mechanical causation: Stimulus A causes response B. But almost as soon as we acquire language, we are taught an entirely different system: purposive causation, in which a person engaged in behavior B in order to accomplish result A. Never mind that it was X and Y, not A, that resulted. When it comes to evaluating human behavior, we quickly learn that it is the story we believe about a person's purpose that counts most.
You know the phrases of moral evaluation: “Why did you do that?” “I didn't mean to.” “I was just trying to surprise you.” “Do you want me to be humiliated in front of everybody?” “I don't work my fingers to the bone so you can go out and …” All of these sentences contain or invite stories; it is the stories we believe about our behavior that give them their moral value. Even the cruelest or weakest among us must find stories that excuse—or even ennoble—their own character flaws. On the day I'm writing this, the mayor of a major American city, arrested for using cocaine, actually stood before the cameras and said, in effect, “I guess I've just been working so hard serving the people that I didn't have time to take care of my own needs.” What a story— smoking crack as an altruistic, selfless endeavor. The point is not whether the story is true; the point is that all human beings engage in storytelling about themselves, creating the story they want to believe about themselves, the story they actually believe about themselves, the story they want others to believe about them, the stories they believe about others, and the stories that they are afraid might be true about themselves and others.
Our very identity is a collection of the stories we have come to believe about ourselves. We are bombarded with the stories of others about us; even our memories of our own lives are filtered through the stories we have constructed to interpret those past events. We revise our identity by revising our self-story. Traditional psychotherapies rely heavily on this process: You thought you were trying to do X, but in fact your unconscious purpose was Y. Ah, now I understand myself! But I think not—I think that in the moment of believing the new story you simply revised your identity. I am no longer a person who tries to do X. I am a person who was being driven to do Y, without even realizing it. You remain the same person, who performed the same acts. Only the story has been changed.
All this deals with individual identities, and the tragedy of the individual is that the true cause of his behavior remains forever unknowable. And if we cannot know ourselves, true understanding of any other human being is permanently out of reach. Other people's behavior must be, in that case, completely unpredictable And yet no human community could ever exist if we had no mechanism to enable us to feel safe in trusting other people's behavior to follow certain predictable patterns. And these predictable patterns can't arise solely from personal experience—we must know, with some certainty, before we have observed another member of the community for any length of time, what he or she is likely to do in most situations.
There are two kinds of stories that not only give us the illusion of understanding other people's behavior, but also go a long way toward making that illusion true. Each community has its own epic: a complex of stories about what it means to be a member of that community. These stories can arise from shared experience: Have you ever heard two Catholics reminisce about catechism or being taught in Catholic school by nuns? Or they can arise from what is perceived to be a common heritage, spreading a sense of community identity across space and time. Thus it is that Americans feel there is nothing incongruous about referring to Washington as “our” first president, even though no living American was present for his administration and most Americans have precious few ancestors who lived here during that time. Thus it is that an American living in Los Angeles can hear of something that happened in Springfield, Illinois, or Springfield, Massachusetts, and say, “Only here in America …”
Of course, membership in communities is never absolute. The same person could just as easily say, “We sure aren't like that here in California” or “here in L.A.,” thus asserting the epic of another community. But the more important a community is to us, the more power its stories have in forming our view of the world—and in shaping our own behavior. I don't think my children are the only ones who've heard prescriptive epic stories like this one: “I don't care what other people's children do. In our family we …” Every community's epic includes shibboleth stories—stories that define what members do and do not do. “No good Baptist would ever …”“… just like a true American.” And the stories that define a person's individual identity are often interpreted by the role that person plays within the community. “You make us all so proud of you, son.” “An outstanding role model for young---------s.” “I just wish other young people would be more like you.” “I hope you're proud of the example you're setting for the other kids.” “Now everybody's going to think all us blacks/Rotarians/Jews/Americans are like you!” Thus we not only are defined by the epic stories of the communities we belong to, but also help revise the community's epic stories by our behavior. (If I were going into this in detail, I'd talk about the role of outsiders in shaping a community's epic, and also about negative epic. But this is an essay, not a book in itself.)
The second category of story that shapes human behavior so that we can live together is not perceived as being tied to a particular community. It is mythic; those who believe in the story believe that it defines the way human beings behave. These stories are not really about how this character or that character behaved in a certain situation. They are about how people behave in such situations.
All storytelling contains elements of the particular, the epic, and the mythic. Fiction and scripture are both uniquely suited to telling mythic tales, however, because by definition fiction is not tied to particular people in the real world, and by definition scripture is perceived by its believers to be the universal truth rather than being merely and particularly true, the way history is usually received. That fiction and scripture are also inevitably epic, reflecting values and assumptions of the community out of which they arose, is true but not terribly important, for their audience believes mythic stories to be universal and, over time, comes to behave as if they were universal.
But fiction is not all equally mythic. Some fiction is quite particular, tied to a time and place and even characters in the real world. Thus historical fiction or contemporary realistic fiction with a strong sense of place can lead the reader to say, “Those people certainly were/are strange,” rather than the more mythic response, “People certainly are strange,” or the even more mythic response, “I never knew people were like that,” or the ultimate mythic response, “Yes, that's how people are.”
It might seem then that fiction becomes more mythic as it is divorced from identifiable real-world patterns, but it is not really the disconnection from reality that makes fiction mythic—if that were so, our myths would all be of madmen. Rather a story becomes more mythic as it connects to things that transcend reality. Tolkien's Middle Earth is so thoroughly created in The Lord of the Rings that the wealth of detail makes readers feel as though they had visited in a real place; but it is a place where human behavior takes on enormous importance, so that moral issues (the goodness or evil of a person's choices and actions) and causal issues (why things happen; the way the world works) take on far greater clarity. We find in Aragorn, not- just that he is noble, but Nobility. We find in Frodo, not just that he is willing to bear a difficult burden, but Acceptance. And Samwise is not just a faithful servant, but also the personification of Service.
Thus it is in fantasy that we can most easily explore, not human behaviors, but Humanity. And in exploring it, we also define it; and in defining, invent it. Those of us who have received a story and believed in its truth (even if we don't believe in its factuality) carry those memories inside us and, if we care enough about the tale, act out the script it provides us. Because I remember standing at the Cracks of Doom, and because I remember experiencing it through Sam Gamgee's eyes, I clearly remember seeing that those who reach for power are possessed by it, and if they are not utterly destroyed by it, they lose part of themselves in getting free. I doubt that in crucial situations I'll summon up the memory of Lord of the Rings and consciously use it as a guide to my behavior—who has time for such involved mental processes when a choice is urgent, anyway? But unconsciously I remember being a person who made certain choices, and at that unconscious level I don't believe that I—or anyone— distinguishes between personal and community memories. They are all stories, and we act out the ones we believe in and care about most, the ones that have become part of us.
While I have been speaking about what fantasy can be—a particularly powerful source of mythic stories—it is worth pointing out that most fantasy, like most other kinds of fiction, doesn't live up to its potential. Furthermore, because it is to be received and acted upon unconsciously, the most successful fantasy is not often that which looks most mythic; often the most powerful fantasies are those that seem to be very realistic and particular. I think this is part of the reason that Tolkien shunned allegory. Consciously figured storytelling is received intellectually; it is never as powerful as stories whose symbols and figures—whose mythic connections—are received unconsciously. And I've come to believe that the most successful mythic writing is that storytelling in which the author was unconscious of his or her most powerful mythic elements.
So, while the best fantasy will have a powerful mythic effect, the most successful fantasists are not those who set out to write myth. Rather, the best fantasies come, I think, from storytellers who strive to create a particular story very well—but who use settings and events that give great freedom to their imagination, so that mythic elements can arise from their unconscious and play a strong role in the story. A fantasist who works from a deliberate plan will almost never achieve as much as the fantasist who is constantly surprised by the best moments in his or her stories.
You can see, then, that I'm not defining fantasy the way the word is used in contemporary publishing. When publishers speak of fantasy they generally mean stories set in a kind of pseudo-medieval world in which some kind of magic plays a role. Certainly good mythic fantasy can still be written in that kind of setting; but since such a world has been a staple of romance since before Chaucer, one can hardly credit most authors who work in it with having allowed their imagination to play a large role in their writing. Most such “fantasists” tuck their imagination away somewhere before they enter the mythic marketplace; they have come to buy, not to sell.
It's worth pointing out that works of derivative fantasists often sell very well; there is a large audience that buys fantasy in order to have their pre-existing vision of The Way Things Work reaffirmed. And some quite brilliant fantasists remain obscure, because their mythic universe is so challenging that few readers are happy to dwell in it. But when a fantasist imagines well—and writes evocatively—many people drink in the story as if it were water, and their lives till then a vast desert in which they wandered without ever realizing how much they thirsted.
The real fantasists are not content to echo other writers' myths. They must discover their own. They venture into the most dangerous, uncharted places in the human soul, where existing stories don't yet explain what people think and feel and do. In that frightening place they find a mirror that lets them glimpse a true image. Then they return and hold up the mirror, and unlike mirrors in the real world, this one holds the storyteller's image for just a fleeting moment, just long enough for us also to glimpse the long-shadowed soul that brightly lingers there. In that moment we make the mythic connection; for that moment we are another person; and we carry that rare and precious understanding with us until we die.
And what am I? Like most who attempt fantasy, I imagine that I am doing true Imagining; like most, I am usually echoing other people's visions. There's always the hope, though, that at least some readers will dip into the old dry well and find new water there, seeped in from an undiscovered spring.
When Christian Haroldsen was six months old, preliminary tests showed a predisposition toward rhythm and a keen awareness of pitch. There were other tests, of course, and many possible routes still open to him. But rhythm and pitch were the governing signs of his own private zodiac, and already the reinforcement began. Mr. and Mrs. Haroldsen were provided with tapes of many kinds of sound, and instructed to play them constantly, waking or sleeping.
When Christian Haroldsen was two years old, his seventh battery of tests pinpointed the future he would inevitably follow. His creativity was exceptional, his curiosity insatiable, his understanding of music so intense that the top of all the tests said “Prodigy.”
Prodigy was the word that took him from his parents' home to a house in a deep deciduous forest where winter was savage and violent and summer a brief desperate eruption of green. He grew up cared for by unsinging servants, and the only music he was allowed to hear was birdsong, and windsong, and the cracking of winter wood; thunder, and the faint cry of golden leaves as they broke free and tumbled to the earth; rain on the roof and the drip of water from icicles; the chatter of squirrels and the deep silence of snow falling on a moonless night.
These sounds were Christian's only conscious music; he grew up with the symphonies of his early years only a distant and impossible-to-retrieve memory. And so he learned to hear music in unmusical things—for he had to find music, even when there was none to find.
He found that colors made sounds in his mind; sunlight in summer a blaring chord; moonlight in winter a thin mournful wail; new green in spring a low murmur in almost (but not quite) random rhythms; the flash of a red fox in the leaves a gasp of startlement.
And he learned to play all those sounds on his Instrument.
In the world were violins, trumpets, clarinets and krumhorns, as there had been for centuries. Christian knew nothing of that. Only his Instrument was available. It was enough.
One room in Christian's house, which he had alone most of the time, he lived in: a bed (not too soft), a chair and table, a silent machine that cleaned him and his clothing, and an electric light.
The other room contained only his Instrument. It was a console with many keys and strips and levers and bars, and when he touched any part of it, a sound came out. Every key made a different sound; every point on the strips made a different pitch; every lever modified the tone; every bar altered the structure of the sound.
When he first came to the house, Christian played (as children will) with the Instrument, making strange and funny noises. It was his only playmate; he learned it well, could produce any sound he wanted to. At first he delighted in loud, blaring tones. Later he began to play with soft and loud, and to play two sounds at once, and to change those two sounds together to make a new sound, and to play again a sequence of sounds he had played before.
Gradually, the sounds of the forest outside his house found their way into the music he played. He learned to make winds sing through his Instrument; he learned to make summer one of the songs he could play at will; green with its infinite variations was his most subtle harmony; the birds cried out from his Instrument with all the passion of Christian's loneliness.
And the word spread to the licensed Listeners:
“There's a new sound north of here, east of here; Christian Haroldsen, and he'll tear out your heart with his songs.”
The Listeners came, a few to whom variety was everything first, then those to whom novelty and vogue mattered most, and at last those who valued beauty and passion above everything else. They came, and stayed out in Christian's woods, and listened as his music was played through perfect speakers on the roof of his house. When the music stopped, and Christian came out of his house, he could see the Listeners moving away; he asked, and was told why they came; he marveled that the things he did for love on his Instrument could be of interest to other people.
He felt, strangely, even more lonely to know that he could sing to the Listeners and yet would never be able to hear their songs.
“But they have no songs,” said the woman who came to bring him food every day. “They are listeners. You are a Maker. You have songs, and they listen.”
“Why?” asked Christian, innocently.
The woman looked puzzled. “Because that's what they want most to do. They've been tested, and they are happiest as Listeners. You are happiest as a Maker. Aren't you happy?”
“Yes,” Christian answered, and he was telling the truth. His life was perfect, and he wouldn't change anything, not even the sweet sadness of the backs of the Listeners as they walked away at the end of his songs.
Christian was seven years old.
For the third time the short man with glasses and a strangely inappropriate mustache dared to wait in the underbrush for Christian to come out. For the third time he was overcome by the beauty of the song that had just ended, a mournful symphony that made the short man with glasses feel the pressure of the leaves above him even though it was summer and they had months left before they would fall. The fall is still inevitable, said Christian's song; through all their life the leaves hold within them the power to die, and that must color their life. The short man with glasses wept—but when the song ended and the other Listeners moved away, he hid in the brush and waited.
This time his wait was rewarded. Christian came out of his house, and walked among the trees, and came toward where the short man with glasses waited. The short man admired the easy, unpostured way that Christian walked. The composer looked to be about thirty, yet there was something childish in the way he looked around him, the way his walk was aimless, and prone to stop just so he could touch (not break) a fallen twig with his bare toes.
“Christian,” said the short man with glasses.
Christian turned, startled. In all these years, no Listener had ever spoken to him. It was forbidden. Christian knew the law.
“It's forbidden,” Christian said.
“Here,” the short man with glasses said, holding out a small black object.
“What is it?”
The short man grimaced. “Just take it. Push the button and it plays.”
“Plays?”
“Music.”
Christian's eyes went wide. “But that's forbidden. I can't have my creativity polluted by hearing other musicians' work. That would make me imitative and derivative instead of original.”
“Reciting,” the man said. “You're just reciting that. This is the music of Bach.” There was reverence in his voice.
“I can't,” Christian said.
And then the short man shook his head. “You don't know. You don't know what you're missing. But I heard it in your song when I came here years ago, Christian. You want this.”
“It's forbidden,” Christian answered, for to him the very fact that a man who knew an act was forbidden still wanted to perform it was astounding, and he couldn't get past the novelty of it to realize that some action was expected of him.
There were footsteps and words being spoken in the distance, and the short man's face became frightened. He ran at Christian, forced the recorder into his hands, then took off toward the gate of the preserve.
Christian took the recorder and held it in a spot of sunlight through the leaves. It gleamed dully. “Bach,” Christian said. Then, “Who is Bach?”
But he didn't throw the recorder down. Nor did he give the recorder to the woman who came to ask him what the short man with glasses had stayed for. “He stayed for at least ten minutes.”
“I only saw him for thirty seconds,” Christian answered.
“And?”
“He wanted me to hear some other music. He had a recorder.”
“Did he give it to you?”
“No,” Christian said. “Doesn't he still have it?”
“He must have dropped it in the woods.”
“He said it was Bach.”
“It's forbidden. That's all you need to know. If you should find the recorder, Christian, you know the law.”
“I'll give it to you.”
She looked at him carefully. “You know what would happen if you listened to such a thing.”
Christian nodded.
“Very well. We'll be looking for it, too. I'll see you tomorrow, Christian. And next time somebody stays after, don't talk to him. Just come back in the house and lock the doors.”
“I'll do that,” Christian said.
When she left, he played his Instrument for hours. More Listeners came, and those who had heard Christian before were surprised at the confusion in his song.
There was a summer rainstorm that night, wind and rain and thunder, and Christian found that he could not sleep. Not from the music of the weather—he'd slept through a thousand such storms. It was the recorder that lay behind the Instrument against the wall. Christian had lived for nearly thirty years surrounded only by this wild, beautiful place and the music he himself made. But now.
Now he could not stop wondering. Who was Bach? Who is Bach? What is his music? How it is different from mine? Has he discovered things that I don't know?
What is his music?
What is his music?
What is his music?
Until at dawn, when the storm was abating and the wind had died, Christian got out of his bed, where he had not slept but only tossed back and forth all night, and took the recorder from its hiding place and played it.
At first it sounded strange, like noise, odd sounds that had nothing to do with the sounds of Christian's life. But the patterns were clear, and by the end of the recording, which was not even a half-hour long, Christian had mastered the idea of fugue and the sound of the harpsichord preyed on his mind.
Yet he knew that if he let these things show up in his music, he would be discovered. So he did not try a fugue. He did not attempt to imitate the harpsichord's sound.
And every night he listened to the recording, for many nights, learning more and more until finally the Watcher came.
The Watcher was blind, and a dog led him. He came to the door and because he was a Watcher the door opened for him without his even knocking.
“Christian Haroldsen, where is the recorder?” the Watcher asked.
“Recorder?” Christian asked, then knew it was hopeless, and took the machine and gave it to the Watcher.
“Oh, Christian,” said the Watcher, and his voice was mild and sorrowful. “Why didn't you turn it in without listening to it?”
“I meant to,” Christian said. “But how did you know?”
“Because suddenly there are no fugues in your work. Suddenly your songs have lost the only Bachlike thing about them. And you've stopped experimenting with new sounds. What were you trying to avoid?”
“This,” Christian said, and he sat down and on his first try duplicated the sound of the harpsichord.
“Yet you've never tried to do that until now, have you?”
“I thought you'd notice.”
“Fugues and harpsichord, the two things you noticed first—and the only things you didn't absorb into your music. All your other songs for these last weeks have been tinted and colored and influenced by Bach. Except that there was no fugue, and there was no harpsichord. You have broken the law. You were put here because you were a genius, creating new things with only nature for your inspiration. Now, of course, you're derivative, and truly new creation is impossible for you. You'll have to leave.”
“I know,” Christian said, afraid yet not really understanding what life outside his house would be like.
“We'll train you for the kinds of jobs you can pursue now. You won't starve. You won't die of boredom. But because you broke the law, one thing is forbidden to you now.”
“Music.”
“Not all music. There is music of a sort, Christian, that the common people, the ones who aren't Listeners, can have. Radio and television and record music. But living music and new music—those are forbidden to you. You may not sing. You may not play an instrument. You may not tap out a rhythm.”
“Why not?”
The Watcher shook his head. “The world is too perfect, too at peace, too happy for us to permit a misfit who broke the law to go about spreading discontent. The common people make casual music of a sort, knowing nothing better because they haven't the aptitude to learn it. But if you—never mind. It's the law. And if you make more music, Christian, you will be punished drastically. Drastically.”
Christian nodded, and when the Watcher told him to come, he came, leaving behind the house and the woods and his Instrument. At first he took it calmly, as the inevitable punishment for his infraction; but he had little concept of punishment, or of what exile from his Instrument would mean.
Within five hours he was shouting and striking out at anyone who came near him, because his fingers craved the touch of the Instrument's keys and levers and strips and bars, and he could not have them, and now he knew that he had never been lonely before.
It took six months before he was ready for normal life. And when he left the Retraining Center (a small building, because it was so rarely used), he looked tired, and years older, and he didn't smile at anyone. He became a delivery truck driver, because the tests said that this was a job that would least grieve him, and least remind him of his loss, and most engage his few remaining aptitudes and interests.
He delivered doughnuts to grocery stores.
And at night he discovered the mysteries of alcohol, and the alcohol and the doughnuts and the truck and his dreams were enough that he was, in his way, content. He had no anger in him. He could live the rest of his life this way, without bitterness.
He delivered fresh doughnuts and took the stale ones away with him.
“With a name like Joe,” Joe always said, “I had to open a bar and grill, just so I could put up a sign saying Joe's Bar and Grill.” And he laughed and laughed, because after all Joe's Bar and Grill was a funny name these days.
But Joe was a good bartender, and the Watcher had put him in the right kind of place. Not in a big city, but in a smaller town; a town just off the freeway, where truck drivers often came; a town not far from a large city, so that interesting things were nearby to be talked about and worried about and bitched about and loved.
Joe's Bar and Grill was, therefore, a nice place to come, and many people came there. Not fashionable people, and not drunks, but lonely people and friendly people in just the right mixture. “My clients are like a good drink, just enough of this and that to make a new flavor that tastes better than any of the ingredients.” Oh, Joe was a poet, he was a poet of alcohol and like many another person these days, he often said, “My father was a lawyer, and in the old days I would have probably ended up a lawyer, too, and I never would have known what I was missing.”
Joe was right. And he was a damn good bartender, and he didn't wish he were anything else, and so he was happy.
One night, however, a new man came in, a man with a doughnut delivery truck and a doughnut brand name on his uniform. Joe noticed him because silence clung to the man like a smell—wherever he walked, people sensed it, and though they scarcely looked at him, they lowered their voices, or stopped talking at all, and they got reflective and looked at the walls and the mirror behind the bar. The doughnut delivery man sat in a corner and had a watered-down drink that meant he intended to stay a long time and didn't want his alcohol intake to be so rapid that he was forced to leave early.
Joe noticed things about people, and he noticed that this man kept looking off in the dark corner where the piano stood. It was an old, out-of-tune monstrosity from the old days (for this had been a bar for a long time) and Joe wondered why the man was fascinated by it. True, a lot of Joe's customers had been interested, but they had always walked over and plunked on the keys, trying to find a melody, failing with the out-of-tune keys, and finally giving up. This man, however, seemed almost afraid of the piano, and didn't go near it.
At closing time, the man was still there, and then, on a whim, instead of making the man leave, Joe turned off the piped-in music and turned off most of the lights, and then went over and lifted the lid and exposed the grey keys.
The doughnut delivery man came over to the piano. Chris, his nametag said. He sat and touched a single key. The sound was not pretty. But the man touched all the keys one by one, and then touched them in different orders, and all the time Joe watched, wondering why the man was so intense about it.
“Chris,” Joe said.
Chris looked up at him.
“Do you know any songs?”
Chris's face went funny.
“I mean, some of those old-time songs, not those fancy ass-twitchers on the radio, but songs. 'In a Little Spanish Town.' My mother sang that one to me.” And Joe began to sing, “In a little Spanish town, 'twas on a night like this. Stars were peek-a-booing down, 'twas on a night like this.”
Chris began to play as Joe's weak and toneless baritone went on with the song. But it wasn't an accompaniment, not anything Joe could call an accompaniment. It was instead an opponent to his melody, an enemy to it, and the sounds coming out of the piano were strange and unharmonious and by God beautiful. Joe stopped singing and listened. For two hours he listened, and when it was over he soberly poured the man a drink, and poured one for himself, and clinked glasses with Chris the doughnut delivery man who could take that rotten old piano and make the damn thing sing.
Three nights later Chris came back, looking harried and afraid. But this time Joe knew what would happen (had to happen) and instead of waiting until closing time, Joe turned off the piped-in music ten minutes early. Chris looked up at him pleadingly.
Joe misunderstood—he went over and lifted the lid to the keyboard and smiled. Chris walked stiffly, perhaps reluctantly, to the stool and sat.
“Hey, Joe,” one of the last five customers shouted, “closing early?”
Joe didn't answer. Just watched as Chris began to play. No preliminaries this time; no scales and wanderings over the keys. Just power, and the piano was played as pianos aren't meant to be played; the bad notes, the out-of-tune notes were fit into the music so that they sounded right, and Chris's fingers, ignoring the strictures of the twelve-tone scale, played, it seemed to Joe, in the cracks.
None of the customers left until Chris finished an hour and a half later. They all shared that final drink, and went home shaken by the experience.
The next night Chris came again, and the next, and the next. Whatever private battle had kept him away for the first few days after his first night of playing, he had apparently won it or lost it. None of Joe's business. What Joe cared about was the fact that when Chris played the piano, it did things to him that music had never done, and he wanted it.
The customers apparently wanted it, too. Near closing time people began showing up, apparently just to hear Chris play. Joe began starting the piano music earlier and earlier, and he had to discontinue the free drinks after the playing because there were so many people it would have put him out of business.
It went on for two long, strange months. The delivery van pulled up outside, and people stood aside for Chris to enter. No one said anything to him; no one said anything at all, but everyone waited until he began to play the piano. He drank nothing at all. Just played. And between songs the hundreds of people in Joe's Bar and Grill ate and drank.
But the merriment was gone. The laughter and the chatter and the camaraderie were missing, and after a while Joe grew tired of the music and wanted to have his bar back the way it was. He toyed with the idea of getting rid of the piano, but the customers would have been angry at him. He thought of asking Chris not to come anymore, but he could not bring himself to speak to the strange silent man.
And so finally he did what he knew he should have done in the first place. He called the Watchers.
They came in the middle of a performance, a blind Watcher with a dog on a leash, and a Watcher with no ears who walked unsteadily, holding to things for balance. They came in the middle of a song, and did not wait for it to end. They walked to the piano and closed the lid gently, and Chris withdrew his fingers and looked at the closed lid.
“Oh, Christian,” said the man with the seeing-eye dog.
“I'm sorry,” Christian answered. “I tried not to.”
“Oh, Christian, how can I bear doing to you what must be done?”
“Do it,” Christian said.
And so the man with no ears took a laser knife from his coat pocket and cut off Christian's fingers and thumbs, right where they rooted into his hands. The laser cauterized and sterilized the wound even as it cut, but still some blood spattered on Christian's uniform. And, his hands now meaningless palms and useless knuckles, Christian stood and walked out of Joe's Bar and Grill. The people made way for him again, and they listened intently as the blind Watcher said, “That was a man who broke the law and was forbidden to be a Maker. He broke the law a second time, and the law insists that he be stopped from breaking down the system that makes all of you so happy.”
The people understood. It grieved them, it made them uncomfortable for a few hours, but once they had returned to their exactly-right homes and got back to their exactly-right jobs, the sheer contentment of their lives overwhelmed their momentary sorrow for Chris. After all, Chris had broken the law. And it was the law that kept them all safe and happy.
Even Joe. Even Joe soon forgot Chris and his music. He knew he had done the right thing. He couldn't figure out, though, why a man like Chris would have broken the law in the first place, or what law he would have broken. There wasn't a law in the world that wasn't designed to make people happy—and there wasn't a law Joe could think of that he was even mildly interested in breaking.
Yet. Once Joe went to the piano and lifted the lid and played every key on the piano. And when he had done that he put his head down on the piano and cried, because he knew that when Chris lost that piano, lost even his fingers so he could never play again—it was like Joe losing his bar. And if Joe ever lost his bar, his life wouldn't be worth living.
As for Chris, someone else began coming to the bar driving the same doughnut delivery van, and no one ever knew Chris again in that part of the world.
“Oh what a beautiful mornin'!” sang the road crew man who had seen Oklahoma! four times in his home town.
“Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham!” sang the road crew man who had learned to sing when his family got together with guitars.
“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!” sang the road crew man who believed.
But the road crew man without hands, who held the signs telling the traffic to Stop or go Slow, listened but never sang.
“Whyn't you never sing?” asked the road crew man who liked Rodgers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.
And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. “Don't feel like singin',” he'd say, when he said anything at all.
“Why they call him Sugar?” a new guy once asked. “He don't look sweet to me.”
And the man who believed said, “His initials are C H. Like the sugar. C&H, you know.” And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road-building crew.
Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.
Except Sugar.
Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, “I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano!” And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything) he'd explain. “I'm an Italian tenor in a Mexican body,” and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. “Caruso was nothing,” Guillermo boasted. “Listen to this!”
Guillermo had records, and sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he'd join in with any man's song and harmonize with it, or sing an obligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. “I can sing,” Guillermo would say, and soon the other road crew men answered. “Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!”
But one night Guillermo was honest, and told the truth. “Ah, my friends, I'm no singer.”
“What do you mean? Of course you are!” came the unanimous answer.
“Nonsense!” Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. “If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I'm just a man who loves to sing, but has no talent! I'm a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you, and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never!”
He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. “Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don't be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he's not!”
It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew, and didn't wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.
“Come on, Sugar. Aren't you happy here?”
Sugar smiled. “I'm happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing.”
“Then why don't you sing with us?”
Sugar shook his head. “I'm not a singer.”
But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. “Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?”
“What the hell does that mean?” asked the man who sang folksongs.
“It means that this man you call Sugar, he's a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men's fingers?”
The road crew didn't try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone's business.
“He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That's how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn't he?”
“Stop,” Sugar said.
“If you want,” Guillermo said, but for once the others would not respect Sugar's privacy.
“Tell us,” they said.
Sugar left the room.
“Tell us,” and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music anymore. The very thought that a Maker was working on the road crew with them—even a lawbreaker—filled the men with awe. Makers were rare, and they were the most esteemed of men and women.
“But why his fingers?”
“Because,” Guillermo said, “he must have tried to make music again afterward. And when you break the law a second time, the power to break it a third time is taken away from you.” Guillermo spoke seriously, and so to the road crew men Sugar's story sounded as majestic and terrible as an opera. They crowded into Sugar's room, and found the man staring at the wall.
“Sugar, is it true?” asked the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein.
“Were you a Maker?” asked the man who believed.
“Yes,” Sugar said.
“But Sugar,” the man who believed said, “God can't mean for a man to stop making music, even if he broke the law.”
Sugar smiled. “No one asked God.”
“Sugar,” Guillermo finally said, “There are nine of us on the crew, nine of us, and we're miles from any human beings. You know us, Sugar. We swear on our mother's graves, every one of us, that we'll never tell a soul. Why should we? You're one of us. But sing, dammit man, sing!”
“I can't,” Sugar said. “You don't understand.”
“It isn't what God intended,” said the man who believed. “We're all doing what we love best, and here you are, loving music and not able to sing a note. Sing for us! Sing with us! And only you and us and God will know!”
They all promised. They all pleaded.
And the next day as the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein sang “Love, Look Away,” Sugar began to hum. As the man who believed sang “God of Our Fathers” Sugar sang softly along. And as the man who loved folksongs sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Sugar joined in with a strange, piping voice and all the men laughed and cheered and welcomed Sugar's voice to the songs.
Inevitably Sugar began inventing. First harmonies, of course, strange harmonies that made Guillermo frown and then, after a while, grin as he joined in, sensing as best he could what Sugar was doing to the music.
And after harmonies, Sugar began singing his own melodies, with his own words. He made them repetitive, the word simple and the melodies simpler still. And yet he shaped them into odd shapes, and built them into songs that had never been heard of before, that sounded wrong and yet were absolutely right. It was not long before the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein and the man who sang folksongs and the man who believed were learning Sugar's songs and singing them joyously or mournfully or angrily or gaily as they worked along the road.
Even Guillermo learned the songs, and his strong tenor was changed by them until his voice, which had, after all, been ordinary, became something unusual and fine. Guillermo finally said to Sugar one day, “Hey, Sugar, your music is all wrong, man. But I like the way it feels in my nose! Hey, you know? I like the way it feels in my mouth!”
Some of the songs were hymns: “Keep me hungry, Lord,” Sugar sang, and the road crew sang it too.
Some of the songs were love songs: “Put your hands in someone else's pockets,” Sugar sang angrily; “I hear your voice in the morning,” Sugar sang tenderly; “Is it summer yet?” Sugar sang sadly; and the road crew sang it, too.
Over the months the road crew changed, one man leaving on Wednesday and a new man taking his place on Thursday, as different skills were needed in different places. Sugar was silent when each newcomer came, until the man had given his word and the secret was sure to be kept.
What finally destroyed Sugar was the fact that his songs were so unforgettable. The men who left would sing the songs with their new crews, and those crews would learn them, and teach them to others. Crewmen taught the songs in bars and on the road; people learned them quickly, and loved them; and one day a blind Watcher heard the songs and knew, instantly, who had first sung them. They were Christian Haroldsen's music, because in those melodies, simple as they were, the wind of the north woods still whistled and the fall of leaves still hung oppressively over every note and—and the Watcher sighed. He took a specialized tool from his file of tools and boarded an airplane and flew to the city closest to where a certain road crew worked. And the blind Watcher took a company car with a company driver up the road and at the end of it, where the road was just beginning to pierce a strip of wilderness, the blind Watcher got out of the car and heard singing. Heard a piping voice singing a song that made even an eyeless man weep.
“Christian,” the Watcher said, and the song stopped.
“You,” said Christian.
“Christian, even after you lost your fingers?”
The other men didn't understand—all the other men, that is, except Guillermo.
“Watcher,” said Guillermo. “Watcher, he done no harm.”
The Watcher smiled wryly. “No one said he did. But he broke the law. You, Guillermo, how would you like to work as a servant in a rich man's house? How would you like to be a bank teller?”
“Don't take me from the road crew, man,” Guillermo said.
“It's the law that finds where people will be happy. But Christian Haroldsen broke the law. And he's gone around ever since making people hear music they were never meant to hear.”
Guillermo knew he had lost the battle before it began, but he couldn't stop himself. “Don't hurt him, man. I was meant to hear his music. Swear to God, it's made me happier.”
The Watcher shook his head sadly. “Be honest, Guillermo. You're an honest man. His music's made you miserable, hasn't it? You've got everything you could want in life, and yet his music makes you sad. All the time, sad.”
Guillermo tried to argue, but he was honest, and he looked into his own heart, and he knew that the music was full of grief. Even the happy songs mourned for something; even the angry songs wept; even the love songs seemed to say that everything dies and contentment is the most fleeting thing. Guillermo looked in his own heart and all Sugar's music stared back up at him and Guillermo wept.
“Just don't hurt him, please,” Guillermo murmured as he cried.
“I won't,” the blind Watcher said. Then he walked to Christian, who stood passively waiting, and he held the special tool up to Christian's throat. Christian gasped.
“No,” Christian said, but the word only formed with his lips and tongue. No sound came out. Just a hiss of air. “No.”
The road crew watched silently as the Watcher led Christian away. They did not sing for days. But then Guillermo forgot his grief one day and sang an aria from La Boheme, and the songs went on from there. Now and then they sang one of Sugar's songs, because the songs could not be forgotten.
In the city, the blind Watcher furnished Christian with a pad of paper and a pen. Christian immediately gripped the pencil in the crease of his palm and wrote: “What do I do now?”
The driver read the note aloud, and the blind Watcher laughed. “Have we got a job for you! Oh, Christian, have we got a job for you!” The dog barked loudly, to hear his master laugh.
In all the world there were only two dozen Watchers. They were secretive men, who supervised a system that needed little supervision because it actually made nearly everybody happy. It was a good system, but like even the most perfect of machines, here and there it broke down. Here and there someone acted madly, and damaged himself, and to protect everyone and the person himself, a Watcher had to notice the madness and go to fix it.
For many years the best of the Watchers was a man with no fingers, a man with no voice. He would come silently, wearing the uniform that named him with the only name he needed—Authority. And he would find the kindest, easiest, yet most thorough way of solving the problem and curing the madness and preserving the system that made the world, for the first time in history, a very good place to live. For practically everyone.
For there were still a few people—one or two each year—who were caught in a circle of their own devising, who could neither adjust to the system nor bear to harm it, people who kept breaking the law despite their knowledge that it would destroy them.
Eventually, when the gentle maimings and deprivations did not cure their madness and set them back into the system, they were given uniforms and they, too, went out. Watching.
The keys of power were placed in the hands of those who had most cause to hate the system they had to preserve. Were they sorrowful?
“I am,” Christian answered in the moments when he dared to ask himself that question.
In sorrow he did his duty. In sorrow he grew old. And finally the other Watchers, who reverenced the silent man (for they knew he had once sung magnificent songs), told him he was free. “You've served your time,” said the Watcher with no legs, and he smiled.
Christian raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “And?”
“So wander.”
Christian wandered. He took off his uniform, but lacking neither money nor time he found few doors closed to him. He wandered where in his former lives he had once lived. A road in the mountains. A city where he had once known the loading entrance of every restaurant and coffee shop and grocery store. And at last to a place in the woods where a house was falling apart in the weather because it had not been used in forty years.
Christian was old. The thunder roared and it only made him realize that it was about to rain. All the old songs. All the old songs, he mourned inside himself, more because he couldn't remember them than because he thought his life had been particularly sad.
As he sat in a coffee shop in a nearby town to stay out of the rain, he heard four teenagers who played the guitar very badly singing a song that he knew. It was a song he had invented while the asphalt poured on a hot summer day. The teenagers were not musicians and certainly were not Makers. But they sang the song from their hearts, and even though the words were happy, the song made everyone who heard it cry.
Christian wrote on the pad he always carried, and showed his question to the boys. “Where did that song come from?”
“It's a Sugar song,” the leader of the group answered. “It's a song by Sugar.”
Christian raised an eyebrow, making a shrugging motion.
“Sugar was a guy who worked on a road crew and made up songs. He's dead now, though,” the boy answered.
“Best damn songs in the world,” another boy said, and they all nodded.
Christian smiled. Then he wrote (and the boys waited impatiently for this speechless old man to go away): “Aren't you happy? Why sing sad songs?”
The boys were at a loss for an answer. The leader spoke up, though, and said, “Sure I'm happy. I've got a good job, a girl I like, and man, I couldn't ask for more. I got my guitar. I got my songs. And my friends.”
And another boy said, “These songs aren't sad, Mister. Sure, they make people cry, but they aren't sad.”
“Yeah,” said another. “It's just that they were written by a man who knows.”
Christian scribbled on his paper. “Knows what?”
“He just knows. Just knows, that's all. Knows it all.”
And then the teenagers turned back to their clumsy guitars and their young, untrained voices, and Christian walked to the door to leave because the rain had stopped and because he knew when to leave the stage. He turned and bowed just a little toward the singers. They didn't notice him, but their voices were all the applause he needed. He left the ovation and went outside where the leaves were just turning color and would soon, with a slight inaudible sound, break free and fall to the earth.
For a moment he thought he heard himself singing. But it was just the last of the wind, coasting madly through the wires over the street. It was a frenzied song, and Christian thought he recognized his voice.
Siggy wasn't the killer type. Nor did he have delusions of grandeur. In fact, if he had any delusions, they were delusions of happiness. When he was thirty, he gave up a good job as a commercial artist and went down in the world, deliberately downward in income, prestige, and tension. He bought a cab.
“Who is going to drive this cab, Siggy?” his mother asked. She was a German of the old school, well-bred with contempt for the servant class.
“I am,” Siggy answered mildly. He endured the tirade that followed, but from then on his sole source of income was the cab. He didn't work every day. But whenever he felt like working or getting out of the apartment or picking up some money, he would take his cab out in Manhattan. His cab was spotless. He gave excellent service. He enjoyed himself immensely. And when he came home, he sat down at the easel or with a sketchpad on his knees, and did art. He wasn't very good. His talents had been best suited for commercial art. Anything more difficult than the back of a Cheerios box, and Siggy was out of his element. He never sold any of his paintings. But he didn't really care. He loved everything he did and everything he was.
So did his wife, Marie. She was French, he was German; they married and moved to America on the eve of World War II, bringing their families with them, and they were exquisitely well matched and happy through both of Siggy's careers. In 1978, at the age of fifty-seven, she died of a heart attack, and Siggy took the cab out and drove for eleven hours without picking up a single fare. At four o'clock in the morning, he finally made his decision and drove home. He would go on living. And sooner than he expected, he was happy again.
He had never dreamed of conquering the world or of getting rich or even of getting into bed with a movie star or a high-class prostitute. So it was not in his nature to imagine himself doing impossible things. It took him rather by surprise when he was onsen to save America.
She was a Disney fairy godmother, and she came in the craziest dream he had ever had. “You, Siegfried Reinhardt, are the lucky winner of exactly one wish,” she said, sounding like the lady from Magic Carpet Land the last time she called to offer a free carpet cleaning.
“One?” Siggy answered in his dream, thinking this was rather below standard for godmothers.
“And you have a choice,” the fairy godmother answered. “You may either use the wish on your own behalf, or you may use it to save America.”
“America's going to hell and needs all the wishes it can get.” Siggy said. “On the other hand, I don't really need anything I haven't got already. So it's America.”
“Very well,” she answered, and turned to go.
“Wait a minute,” he said in his dream. “Is that all?”
“You asked for a wish for America, you get a wish for America. Which is a waste of a perfectly good wish, if you ask me, for thirty years America hasn't been worth scheisse. Try not to mess things up too badly, Siggy. This wish business is pretty complicated, and you're a simple type fellow.” And then she was gone, and Siggy woke up, the dream impressed on his memory as dreams so rarely were.
Crazy, crazy, he thought, laughing it off. I'm getting old, Marie dragged me to too many Disney movies, I'm too lonely. But for all that he knew the dream was nonsense, he could not forget it.
I mean, what if, he told himself. What if I had a wish. Just one thing I could change, to make everybody in America happier. What would it be?
“What's wrong with America?” his mother asked, rolling her eyes and rocking back and forth in her wheelchair. To Siggy's knowledge she had never had a rocking chair in her life, and compensated by moving in every other kind of chair as if it were a rocker. “Everything's wrong with America,” she said.
“But one thing, Mother. Just the worst thing to fix.”
“It's too late, nothing can fix it. It all started with him. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, may he be reincarnated as a fly that I can swat. May he come back as a fire hydrant for all the dogs to pee against.” Siggy's mother was impeccably polite in German, but in English she was crude, and, as so often before, Siggy wondered why she still lingered on at a ridiculous ninety-two when Marie, who was delicate and sensitive, was dead. “Don't be crude, Mother.”
“I'm an American, I have the papers, I can be crude. Nineteen sixty-eight, that's when everything went to Hell.”
“You can't blame everything on one man.”
“What do you know? You drive a cab.”
“One man doesn't make that big a difference.”
“What about Adolf Hitler!” his mother said triumphantly, slapping the arms of the wheelchair and rocking back and forth. “Adolf Hitler! One man! Just like Richard Nixon, may his electric razor short-circuit and fry his face.”
She was still laughing and cursing Nixon when Siggy finally left. Fairy godmother, he said to himself. What do I need a fairy godmother for? I have Mom.
But the dream wouldn't go away. The fairy godmother kept flitting in and out, hovering on the edges of all his dreams, wordlessly saying, “Hurry and make up your mind, Siggy. Fairy godmothers are busy, you're wasting my time.”
“Don't push me,” he said. “I'm being careful.”
“I've got other clients, give me a break.”
“I resent being pushed around by figments of my imagination,” he said. “I get one wish, I want to use it right.” When he woke up, he was vaguely embarrassed that he was taking the fairy godmother so seriously in his dreams. “Just a dream,” he said to himself. But dream or not, he started doing research.
He took a poll. He kept a notebook beside him in the cab, and asked people, “Just out of curiosity what's the worst thing wrong with America? What's the one thing you'd change if you could?”
There were quite a few suggestions, but they always came back to Richard Nixon. “It all started with Nixon,” they'd say. Or, “It's Carter. But if it hadn't been for Nixon, Carter would never have been elected.”
“It's the unions, driving up prices,” said a woman. And then, after a little thought, “If Nixon hadn't screwed up we might have kept some control in this country.”
It wasn't just that his name kept coming up. It was the way people said it. With loathing, with contempt, with fear. It was an emotional word. It sounded evil. They said Nixon the way they might say slime. Or spider.
Siggy sat one night staring at the results of his poll, unable to get out of his cab because of the thoughts that had taken over his head. I'm crazy, he thought to himself, but his thoughts ignored him and went right on, the fairy godmother giggling in the background. Richard Nixon, said the thoughts. If there could be one wish, it must be used to eliminate Richard Nixon.
But I voted for him, dammit, Siggy said silently. He thought it would be silent, but the words echoed inside the cab after all. “I voted for him. And I thought he did a damn good job sometimes.” He was almost embarrassed saying the words—they weren't the kind of sentiment that made a cabby popular with his paying passengers. But thinking of Nixon made him remember the triumphant moment when Nixon said Up Yours to the North Vietnamese and bombed the hell out of them and got them to the negotiating table that one last time. And the wonderful landslide election that kept the crazy man from South Dakota out of the White House. And the trip to China, and the trip to Russia, and the feeling that America was maybe strong like it had been under Roosevelt when Hitler got his ass kicked up into his throat. Siggy remembered that, remembered that it felt good, remembered being angry as the press attacked and attacked and attacked and finally Nixon fell apart and turned out to be exactly as rotten a person as the papers said he was.
And the feeling of betrayal that he had felt all through 1973 came back, and Siggy said, “Nixon,” and inside the cab his voice sounded even more poisonous than the passengers'.
If there was something wrong with America, Siggy knew then, it was Richard Nixon. Whether a person had ever liked him or not. Because those who liked him had been betrayed, and those who hated him had not been appeased, and there he was out in California breeding the hatred that surpassed even the hatred for the phone company and the unions and the oil companies and the Congress.
I will wish him dead, Siggy thought. And inside his mind he could hear the fairy godmother cheering. “Make the wish,” she said.
“Not yet,” Siggy said. “I've got to be fair.”
“Fair, schmair. Make the wish, I've got work to do.”
“I've got to talk to him first,” Siggy said. “I can't wish him dead without he has a chance to say his piece.”
Siggy had planned to travel alone. Who would understand his purpose, when he didn't really understand it himself? He told no one he was going, just pulled five hundred dollars out of the bank and got in his cab and started driving. New Jersey, Pennsylvania; found himself on I-70 and decided what the hell, I-70 goes most of the way, that's my highway. He stopped at Richmond, Indiana, to go to the bathroom and get something to eat, then decided to spend the night in a cheap motel.
It was his first night in unfamiliar surroundings in years. It bothered him; things were out of place, and the sheets were rough and harsh, and there weren't a hundred reminders of Marie and happiness. He slept badly (but, thank heaven, without the fairy godmother), and when he left in the morning he realized that he was lonelier then he thought possible. He wasn't used to driving without conversation. He wasn't used to driving without a fare.
So he picked up a hitchhiker waiting by the on-ramp to the freeway. It was a boy —no, in his own eyes doubtless a man—in his early twenties. Hair fairly long, but cleaner than the usual scruffy roadside bum, and he'd be somebody to talk to, and if there was any trouble, well, Siggy had always carried a tire iron beside the seat, though he was not quite sure what he would ever do with it, or when. It made him feel safe. Safe enough to pull over and pick up the boy.
Siggy reached over and opened the car door as the boy ran up.
“Hey, uh,” the boy said, leaning into the car. “I don't need a cab, I need a free ride.”
“Don't we all,” Siggy said, smiling. “I'm from New York City. In Indiana, I give free rides. I'm on vacation.”
The boy nodded and got in beside him. Siggy moved out and was on the freeway in moments, going at a steady fifty-five. He put on the cruise control and glanced at the boy. He was looking out the front window, his face glum.
“Where are you going?” Siggy asked.
“West.”
“There's lots of west in the world. Wherever you go, there's still more west on ahead.”
“They put an ocean at the end, I stop before I get wet, OK?”
“I'm going to Los Angeles,” Siggy offered.
The boy said nothing. Obviously didn't want to talk. That was all right. Lots of customers liked silence, and Siggy had no objection to giving it to them. Enough that there was someone breathing in the car. It gave Siggy a feeling of legitimacy. It was all right to drive as long as someone else was in the car.
But this couldn't go on all the way, of course, Siggy realized. When he picked the boy up, he figured on St. Louis, maybe Kansas City, then the boy gets out and Siggy's alone again. He'd have to stop for the night, Denver, maybe. Did the boy think a motel room went along with the ride?
“Where you from?”
The boy seemed to wake up, as if he had dozed off with his eyes wide open. Looking out on Indiana as it went by.
“What do you mean, from?” the boy asked.
“I mean from, the opposite of to. I mean, where were you born, where do you live?”
“I was born in Rochester. I don't think I live anywhere.”
“Rochester. What's it like in Rochester?”
“I lived in a Mafia neighborhood. Everybody kept their yards neat and nobody ever broke into the houses.”
“A lot of factories?”
“Eastman Kodak and Xerox Corporation. There's a lot of shit in the world, and Rochester exists by making copies of it.” The boy said it bitterly, but Siggy laughed. It was funny, after all. The boy finally smiled, too.
“What are you going to do in California?” Siggy asked.
“Find a place to sleep and maybe a job.”
“Want to be an actor?”
The boy looked at Siggy with contempt. “An actor? Like Jane Fonda?” He said the name like poison. The tone of voice was familiar. Siggy decided to try him out on the Name.
“What do you think of Richard Nixon?” Siggy asked.
“I don't,” said the boy.
And then, madly, knowing it could ruin everything, Siggy blurted, “I'm going to get him.”
“What?” the boy asked.
Siggy recovered his senses. Some of them, anyway. “I'm going to meet him. At San Clemente.”
The boy laughed. “What do you want to meet him for?”
Siggy shrugged.
“They won't let you near him anyway. You think he wants to see people like us? Nixon.” And there it was. The tone of voice. The contempt. Siggy was reassured. He was doing the right thing.
The hours passed and so did the states. Illinois came and went, and they crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis. Not as big as Siggy had expected, but still a hell of a lot of water, when you thought about it. Then Missouri, which was too wide and too dull. And because it was dull, they kept talking. The boy had a bitter streak a mile wide— everything seemed to lead to it. Siggy found it more comfortable to do the talking himself, and since the boy kept listening and saying something now and then, it seemed OK. They were beginning to pass signs that promised Kansas City as if it were a prize when Siggy got on the subject of Marie. Remembered things about her. How she loved wine—a French vice that Siggy loved in her.
“When she was a little drunk,” he told the boy, “her eyes would get big. Sometimes full of tears, but she'd still smile. And she'd lift up her chin and stretch her neck. Like a deer.”
Maybe the boy was getting tired of the conversation. Maybe he just resented hearing about a love that actually worked. He answered snappishly. “When you ever seen a deer, Manhattan cabdriver? The zoo?”
Siggy refused to be offended. “She was like a deer.”
“I think she sounds like a giraffe.” The boy smirked a little, as if saying this were somehow a victory over Siggy. Well, it was. It had worn down his patience.
“It's my wife we're talking about. She died two years ago.”
“What do I care? I mean what makes you think I give a pink shit about it? You want to cry? You want to get all weepy about it? Then do it quiet. Jesus, give a guy a break, will you?”
Siggy kept his eyes on the road. There was a bitter feeling in his stomach. For a moment his hands felt violent, and he gripped the wheel. Then the feeling passed, and he got his curiosity back again.
“Hey, what're you so mad about?”
“Mad? What says I'm mad?”
“You sounded mad.”
“I sounded mad!”
“Yeah, I wondered if maybe you wanted to talk about it.”
The boy laughed acidly. “What, the seat reclines? It becomes maybe a couch? I stuck my thumb out because I wanted a ride. I want psychoanalysis, I stick out a different finger, you understand?”
“Hey, fine, relax.”
“I'm not tense, shithead.” He gripped the door handle so tightly that Siggy was afraid the door would crumple like tinfoil and fall away from the car.
“I'm sorry,” the boy said finally, still looking forward. He didn't let go of the door.
“It's OK,” Siggy answered.
“About your wife, I mean. I'm not like that. I don't just go around making fun of people's dead wives.”
“Yeah.”
“And you're right. I'm mad.”
“At me?”
“You? What're you? A piss-ant. One of twelve million piss-ants in New York City. We're all piss-ants.”
“What're you mad at?” Siggy could not resist adding the figures to his checklist. “Inflation? Oil companies? Nuclear plants?”
“What is this, the Gallup poll?”
“Maybe yeah. People get mad at a lot of the same things. Nuclear plants then?”
“I'm mad at nuclear plants, yeah.”
“You want 'em all shut down, right?”
“Wrong, turkey. I want 'em to build a million of 'em. I want 'em to build 'em everywhere, and then on the count of three they all blow up, they wipe out this whole country.”
“America?”
“From sea to shitting sea.”
Then silence again. Siggy thought he could feel the whole car trembling with the young man's anger. It made Siggy sad. He kept glancing at the boy's face. It wasn't old. There were some acne scars; the beard was thin in quite a few places. Siggy tried to imagine the face without the beard. Without the anger. Without the too many drugs and too many bottles. The face when it was childish and innocent.
“You know,” Siggy said, “I can't believe—I look at you, I can't believe that somebody loved you once.”
“Nobody asked you to believe it.”
“But they must have, right? Somebody taught you to walk. And talk. And ride a bicycle. You had a father, right?”
Suddenly the boy's fist shot out and slammed into the glove compartment door, which popped open with a crash. Siggy was startled, afraid. The boy showed no sign of pain, though it seemed he had hit hard enough to break a finger.
“Hey, careful,” Siggy said.
“You want me to be careful? You tell me to be careful, asshole?” The boy grabbed the steering wheel, jerked on it. The taxi swung into another lane; a car behind them squealed on its brakes and honked.
“Are you crazy? Do you want to get us killed? Get mad, wreck the car, but don't kill us!” Siggy was screaming in anger, and the boy sat there, trembling, his eyes not quite focused. Then the car that had honked at them pulled up beside them on the right. The driver was yelling something with his window down. His face looked ugly with anger. The boy held up his middle finger. The man made the same gesture back again.
And suddenly the boy rolled down the window. “Hey, don't get us in trouble,” Siggy said. The boy ignored him. He yelled a string of obscenities out the window. Siggy sped up, trying to pull away from the other car. The driver of the other car kept pace with him, yelled back his own curses.
And then the boy pulled a revolver out of his pocket, a big, mean-looking black pistol, and aimed it out the window at the driver of the other car. The man suddenly looked terrified. Siggy slammed on the brakes, but so did the other driver, and they stayed nearly parallel.
“Don't!” Siggy screamed, and he sped up, leaving the other car in the distance. The boy pulled the gun back into the car and laid it on his lap, the cock still back, his finger still on the trigger.
“It isn't loaded, right?” Siggy asked. “It was just a joke, right? Would you take your finger off the trigger?”
But it was as if the boy didn't hear him. As if he didn't even remember the last few minutes. “You wanted to know if I had a father, right? I have a father.”
At the moment Siggy didn't much care whether the boy had been born in a test tube. But better he should talk about his father than wave the gun around.
“My father,” said the boy, “spends his life making sure enough Xerox machines are getting sold and putting more ads in the magazines when they aren't.”
They crossed the border into Kansas, and Siggy hoped the incident with the pistol wouldn't get reported across state lines.
“My father never taught me to ride a bike. My brother did. My brother was killed in Mr. President Nixon's war. You know?”
“That was a long time ago,” Siggy said.
The boy looked at him coldly. “It was yesterday, asshole. You don't believe those calendars, do you? All lies, so we'll think it's OK to forget about it. Maybe your wife died years ago, Mr. Cabdriver, but I thought you loved her better than that.”
Then the boy looked down at the pistol in his lap, still cocked, still ready to fire.
“I thought I left this home,” he said in surprise. “What's it doing here?”
“I should know?” Siggy asked. “Do me a favor, uncock the thing and put it away.”
“OK,” the boy said. But he didn't do anything.
“Hey, please,” Siggy said. “You scare me, that thing sitting there ready to shoot.”
The boy bowed his head over the pistol for a few moments. “Let me out,” he said. “Let me get out.”
“Hey, come on, just put the gun away, you don't have to get out, I won't be mad, just put the gun away.”
The boy looked up at him and there were tears in his eyes, spilling out onto his cheeks. “You think I brought this gun by accident? I don't want to kill you.”
“Then why'd you bring it?”
“I don't know. Jesus, man, let me out.”
“You want to go to California, I'm going to California.”
“I'm dangerous,” the boy said.
Damn right you're dangerous, Siggy thought. Damn right. And I'm a doubledamned fool not to let you out of here right this second, right this minute, very next off-ramp I'll pull over and let him off.
“Not to me,” Siggy said, wondering why he wasn't more afraid.
“To you. I'm dangerous to you.”
“Not to me.” And Siggy realized why he was so confident. It was the fairy godmother, sitting inside the back of his head. “You think I'm going to let anything happen to you, dummkopf?” she asked him silently. “If you knock off before you make your wish, it ruins my life. The clerical work alone would take years.” I'm crazy, thought Siggy. This boy is nuts, but I'm crazy.
“Yeah,” the boy said finally, gently letting down the hammer and putting the gun back into the pocket of his jacket. “Not to you.”
They drove in silence for a while, as the plains flattened out and the sky went even flatter and the sun went dim behind the gray overcast. “Richard Nixon, huh?” the boy asked.
“Yeah.”
“You really think they'll let us get near him?”
“I'll see to it,” Siggy said. And it occurred to him for the first time that fairy godmothers might fulfill wishes in unpleasant ways. Wish him dead? I should wish Nixion dead, and this boy goes to prison forever for killing him? Watch it, fairy godmother, he warned. I won't let you trick me. I have a plan, and I won't let you trick me into hurting this boy.
“Hungry, Son?” Siggy asked. “Or can you hold out till Denver?”
“Denver's fine,” said the boy. “But don't call me Son.”
It was hot in Los Angeles, but as Siggy neared the sea the breezes became steadily cooler. He was tired. He was used to driving, but not so long a stretch, not so far. In a way the freeways were restful—no traffic, no guesswork about where the car to the right would be a few minutes later. People actually paid attention to the lines between lanes. But the freeways went on, relentlessly, mile after mile, until he felt like he was standing still and the road and the scenery played swiftly past him and under him. At last they had brought Los Angeles to him, and here the scenery would stop for him and wait for him to act. San Clemente. Richard Nixon's house. He found them easily, as if he had always known the way. The boy, asleep beside him for the last few hundred miles, woke up when Siggy brought the cab to a halt.
“What?” asked the boy, sleepily.
“Go back to sleep,” Siggy said, getting out of the car. The boy got out, too.
“This is it?”
“Yes,” Siggy said, already walking toward the entrance.
“I gotta pee,” the boy said. But Siggy ignored him, and kept on walking. The boy followed, ran a little, caught up, saying softly, “Shit can't you even wait a minute?”
Secret Service men were everywhere, of course, but by now Siggy's madness was complete. He knew that they could not stop him. He had to meet Richard Nixon, and so he would. He had parked a long way from the mansion, and he just walked in, the boy at his heels. He didn't climb fences or do anything extraordinary. Just walked up the drive, around the house, and out onto the beach. No one saw him. No one called out to him. Secret Servicemen seemed always to have their backs to him, or to be on an urgent errand somewhere else. He would have his meeting with Richard Nixon. He would use his wish.
And he was standing where the water charged up the sand, always falling short of its last achievement as the tide ebbed. The boy stood beside him. Siggy watched the house, but the boy watched Siggy. “I thought they had us,” the boy said. “I can't believe we got in here.”
“Sh,” Siggy answered softly. “Sh.”
Siggy felt as nervous as a virgin at her wedding, more dreading than longing for what was to come. What if Nixon thinks I'm a fool? he thought. He needn't have worried. As he stood in the sand, Nixon emerged from the house, came down to the beach, and stopped at the waterline, staring out to sea. He was alone.
Taking a deep breath, Siggy walked to him. The sand kept slipping under his feet, so that every step forward tried to turn him out of his path. He persevered, and stood beside Richard Nixon. It was the face, the nose, at once the heavily shadowed evil face of the Herblock cartoons and the hopeful, strong face of the man Siggy had voted for three times.
“Mr. Nixon,” Siggy said.
Nixon did not turn at first. He just said, “How did you get here?”
Siggy shrugged. “I had to see you.”
Then Nixon turned to him, his face set to smile. Siggy watched as Nixon's eyes met his, then glanced over his shoulder at the boy, who was walking up, who stopped just behind Siggy.
The boy spoke. “We've come to kill you,” he said.
And the boy had his hand in his pocket, where the gun was, and Siggy felt a moment of panic. But the voice of the fairy godmother sounded gently in his ear. “Don't worry,” she said. “Take your time.”
So Siggy shook his head at the boy, who frowned but did not shoot, and then Siggy turned back to Nixon. The former president was still smiling, his eyes narrowed a bit, but not showing any fear. Siggy felt a moment of satisfaction. This was the Nixon he had admired, the man with such great physical courage, who had faced mobs of Communists in Venezuela and Peru without flinching.
“You wouldn't be the first to want to,” Nixon said.
“Oh, but I don't want to,” Siggy said. “I have to. For America.”
“Ah.” Nixon nodded, knowingly. “We all do the most unpleasant things, don't we, for America.”
Siggy felt a stab of relief. He understood, which would make it all so much easier.
“You're lucky,” Nixon said. “I came out here alone, this once. To say good-bye. I'm leaving here. Tomorrow I would have been gone.” He shook his head slightly, slowly, from side to side. “Well, get on with it. I can't stop you.”
“Oh,” Siggy said. “I'm not going to shoot you. All I have to do is wish you dead.” Behind him Siggy heard the boy gasp a little. And Nixon sighed slightly. For a moment it sounded to Siggy like disappointment. Then he realized it was relief. And the smile returned to Nixon's face.
“But not today,” Siggy went on. “I can't just wish for you to be assassinated now, Mr. Nixon. Or for you to die in bed or in an accident. The damage is done. So I'll have to have you die in the past.”
The boy made a soft noise behind him.
Nixon nodded wisely. “That will be much better, I think.”
“So I've decided that the best time will be right after you're sworn into office the second time. In 1972, before the Watergate thing got out of hand, right after you got a peace treaty from the Vietnamese and right after your landslide victory. Then an assassin picks you off, and you're a bigger hero and a greater legend than Kennedy.”
“And everything since then?” Nixon asked.
“Changed. They won't keep after you, you see, after you're dead. You'll be a pleasant memory to almost everybody. Their hate will be gone, mostly.”
Nixon shook his head. “You said your wish was supposed to be for the good of America, didn't you?”
Siggy nodded.
“Well, if I had been assassinated then, Spiro Agnew would have become president.”
Siggy had forgotten. Spiro Agnew. What a bum. There was no way that could be good for the country. “You're right,” Siggy said. “So it'll have to be before. Right before the election. It'll be almost as good then, you were leading in the polls.”
“But then,” Nixon said, “George McGovern would have been president.”
Worse and worse. Siggy began to realize the difficulties involved in carrying out his responsibility. Everything he changed would have consequences. How could he fix the country's woes, if he kept increasing them with the changes he made?
“And if you have me killed in 1968, it's either Spiro Agnew or Hubert Humphrey,” Nixon added. “Maybe you'll just have to wish for me to win in 1960.”
Siggy thought of that. Thought very carefully. “No,” he said. “That would be good for you. It would have made you a better president, not to have those bad experiences first. But would you have taken us to the moon? Would you have kept the Vietnam War as small as it was?”
“Smaller,” Nixon said. “I would have won it by 1964.”
Siggy shook his head. “And been at war with Red China, and the world might have been destroyed, and millions of people killed. I don't think the wrong man won in 1960.”
Nixon's face went kind of sad. “Then maybe it would be kindest of all if you simply wished for me to lose every election I ever tried. Keep me out of Congress, out of the vice-presidency. Let me be a used car salesman.” And he smiled a twisted, sad smile.
Siggy reached out and touched the man's shoulder. “Maybe I should,” he said, and the boy behind him made another soft sound.
“But no,” Nixon said. “You wanted to save America. And it wouldn't make any difference to keep me out of government. If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else. There would have been a Richard Nixon anyway. If they hadn't wanted me, I wouldn't have been there. If Richard Nixon hadn't existed, they would have made one.”
Siggy sighed. “Then I don't know what to do,” he said.
Nixon turned and looked out over the water. “I only did what they wanted me to do. And when they changed their minds, they were surprised at what I was.” The beach was cold and damp between waves. The breeze from the land carried the air of Los Angeles with it, and it made the beach smell slimy and old. “Maybe,” Nixon said, “there's nothing you can wish for that will save America. Maybe there's nothing you can do at all.”
And the noise the boy made was loud enough that Siggy at last turned to look at him. To his surprise, the boy was no longer standing up. He was sitting cross-legged in the sand, bowed over, his hands gripping each other behind his neck. His body shook.
“What's wrong, Son?” Nixon asked. He sounded concerned.
The boy looked up, anger and grief in his face. “You,” he said, and his voice shook. “You can call me Son.”
Nixon knelt in the sand, painfully as if his leg hurt, and touched the boy's shoulder. “What's wrong, Son?”
“His brother was killed in Vietnam,” Siggy said, as if that explained anything.
“I'm sorry,” Nixon said. “I'm really sorry.”
The boy threw off Nixon's hand. “Do you think that matters? Do you think it makes any difference how sorry you are?” The words stung Nixon, clearly. He shuddered as if his face had been slapped.
“I don't know what else I can do,” Nixon said softly.
The boy's hand shot out and grabbed him by the lapels of his suit, pulling him down until they were face to face, and the boy screamed, “You can pay for it! You can pay and pay and pay—” and the boy's lips and teeth were almost touching Nixon's face, and Nixon looked pathetic and helpless in the boy's grip, flecks of the boy's spit beginning to dot his cheeks and lips. Siggy watched, and realized there was nothing that Nixon could do that would pay it all, that would give the boy back what he had lost, realized that Nixon had not really taken it from the boy. Had not taken it, could not return it, was as much a victim as anyone else. How could Siggy, with a single wish, set it all right? How could he even up all the scales?
“Think, idiot,” said the fairy godmother. “I'm losing patience.”
“I don't know what to do,” he said to her.
“And you're the one with the plan,” she answered contemptuously.
The boy was still screaming, again and again, and Nixon was weeping now, silently letting the tears flow to join the spittle on his face, as if to agree, as if to make it unanimous.
“I wish,” said Siggy, “for everyone to forgive you, Mr. Nixon. For everyone in America to stop hating you, little by little, until all the hate is gone.”
The fairy godmother danced in his mind, waving her wand around and turning everything pink.
And the boy stopped screaming and let go of Nixon, gazed wonderingly into the old man's eyes at the tears there, and said, “I'm sorry for you,” and meant it with all his heart. Then Siggy helped the boy to his feet and they turned away, leaving Nixon on the beach. The world was tinged with pink and Siggy put his arm around the boy and they smiled at each other. And they headed back to the cab. Siggy saw the fairy godmother flying away ahead of them, north and east from San Clemente, trailing stars behind her as she flew.
“Bibbity bobbity boo,” she cried, and she was gone.
They called their country the Beautiful Land, and they were right. It perched on the edge of the continent. Before the Beautiful Land stretched the broad ocean, which few dared to cross; behind it stood the steep Rising, a cliff so high and sheer that few dared to climb. And in such isolation the people, who called themselves, of course, the Beautiful People, lived splendid lives.
Not all were rich, of course. And not all were happy. But there was such a majesty to living in the Beautiful Land that the poverty could easily be missed by the undiscerning eye, and misery seemed so very fleeting. Except to Kiren.
To Kiren, misery was the way of life. For though she lived in a rich house with servants and had, it seemed, anything she could possibly want, she was deeply miserable most of the time. For this was a land where cursing and blessing and magic worked— not always, and not always in the way the person doing it might have planned—but sometimes the cursing worked, and in her case it had.
Not that she had done anything to deserve it; she had been as innocent as any other child in her cradle. But her mother had been a weak woman, and the pain and terror of giving birth had killed her. And Kiren's father loved his wife so much that when he learned of the news, and saw the baby that had been born even as her mother died, he cried out, “You killed her! You killed her! May you never move a muscle in your life, until you lose someone you love as much as I loved her!” It was a terrible curse, and the nurse wept when she heard it, and the doctors stopped Kiren's father's mouth so that he could say no more in his madness.
But his curse took hold, and though he regretted it a million times during Kiren's infancy and childhood, there was nothing he could do. Oh, the curse was not all that strong. Kiren did learn to walk, after a fashion. And she could stand for as much as two minutes at a time. But most of the times she sat or lay down, because she grew so weary, and her muscles only weakly did what she told them to. She could lift a spoon to her mouth, but soon became tired, and had to be fed. She scarcely had the energy to chew.
And every time her father saw her, he wanted to weep, and often did weep. And sometimes he even thought of killing himself to finally wipe away his guilt. But he knew that this would only injure poor Kiren even more, and she had done nothing to deserve injury.
When his guilt grew too much for him to bear, however, he did escape. He put a bag of fine fruits and clever handwork from the Beautiful Land on his back, and set out for the Rising. He would be gone for months, and no one knew when he would return, or whether the Rising would this time prove too much for him and send him plunging to his death. But when he returned, he always brought something for Kiren. And for a while she would smile, and she would say, “Father, thank you.” And things would go well, for a time, until she again became despondent and her father again suffered from watching the results of his ill-thought curse.
It was late spring in the year Kiren turned eleven when her father came home even happier than he usually was after a trip up the Rising. He rushed to his daughter where she lay wanly on the porch listening to the birds.
“Kiren!” he cried. “Kiren! I've brought you a gift!”
And she smiled, though even the muscles for smiling were weak, which made her smile sad. Her father reached into his bag (which was full of all kinds of wonders, which he would, being a careful man, sell to those with money to pay, not just for goods, but for rarity) and he pulled out his gift and handed it to Kiren.
It was a box, and the box lurched violently this way and that.
“There's something alive in there,” Kiren said.
“No, my dear Kiren, there is not. But there's something moving, and it's yours. And before I help you open it, I'll tell you the story. I came one day in my wanderings to a town I had never visited before, and in the town were many merchants. And I asked a man, 'Who has the rarest and best merchandise in town?' He told me that I had to see Irvass. So I found the man in a humble and poor-looking shop. But inside were wonders such as you've never seen. I tell you, the man understands the bright magic from over the sky. And he asked, 'What do you want most in the world?' and of course I said to him, 'I want my daughter to be healed.' ”
“Oh, Father,” said Kiren. “You don't mean—”
“I do mean. I mean it very much. I told him exactly how you are and exactly how you got that way, and he said, 'Here is the cure,' and now let's open the box so you can see.”
So Kiren opened the box, with more than a little help from her father, but she dared not reach inside. “You get it out, Father,” she suggested, and he reached inside and pulled out a porcelain salamander. It was shiny yet deep with fine enameling, and though it was white—not at all the normal color for salamanders—the shape was unmistakable.
It was, in fact, a perfect model of a salamander. And it moved.
The legs raced madly in the air; the tongue darted in and out of the lips; the head turned; the eyes rolled. And Kiren cried out and laughed and said, “Oh, Father, what did he do to make it move so wonderfully!”
“Well,” said her father, “he told me that he had given it the gift of movement— but not the gift of life. And if it ever stops moving, it will immediately become like any other porcelain. Stiff and hard and cold.”
“How it races,” she said, and it became the delight of her life.
When she awoke in the morning the salamander danced on her bed. At mealtimes it raced around the table. Wherever she lay or sat, the salamander was forever chasing after something or exploring something or trying to get away from something. She watched him constantly, and he in turn never got out of sight. And then at night, while she slept, he raced around and around in her room, the porcelain feet hitting the carpet silently, only occasionally making a slight tinkling sound as it ran lightly across the brick of the hearth.
Her father watched for a cure, and slowly but surely it began to come. For one thing, Kiren was no longer miserable. The salamander was too funny not to laugh at. It never went away. And so she felt better. Feeling better was not all of it, though. She began to walk a bit more often, and stay standing more, and sit when ordinarily she would have lain. She began to go from one room to another by her own choice.
By the end of the summer she even took walks into the woods. Though she often had to stop and rest, she enjoyed the journey, and grew a little stronger.
What she never told anyone (partly because she was afraid that it might be her imagination) was that the salamander could also speak.
“You can speak,” she said in surprise one day, when the salamander ran across her foot and said, “Excuse me.”
“Of course,” he said. “To you.”
“Why not anyone else?”
“Because I'm here for you,” he answered, as he ran along the top of the garden wall, then leaped down near her. “It's the way I am. Movement and speech. Best I can do, you know. Can't have life. Doesn't work that way.”
And so on their long walks in the forest they also talked, and Kiren fancied that the salamander had grown as fond of her as she had grown of him. In fact, she told the salamander one day, “I love you.”
“Love love love love love love love,” he answered, scampering up and down a tree.
“Yes,” Kiren said. “More than life. More than anything at all.”
“More than your father?” asked the salamander.
It was hard. Kiren was not a disloyal child, and really had forgiven her father for the curse years before. Yet she had to be honest to her salamander. “Yes,” she said. “More than Father. More than—more than my dream of my mother. For you love me and can play with me and talk to me all the time.”
“Love love love,” said the salamander. “Unfortunately, I'm porcelain. Love love love love love. It's a word. Two consonants and a vowel. Like sap sap sap sap sap. Lovely sound.” And he leaped across a small brook in the way.
“Don't—don't you love me?”
“I can't. It's an emotion, you know. I'm porcelain. Beg your pardon,” and he clambered down her back as she leaned her shoulder on a tree. “Can't love. So sorry.”
She was terribly, terribly hurt. “Don't you feel anything toward me at all?”
“Feel? Feel? Don't confuse things. Emotions come and go. Who can trust them? Isn't it enough that I spend every moment with you? Isn't it enough that I talk only to you? Isn't it enough that I would—that I would—”
“Would what?”
“I was about to start making foolish predictions. I was about to say, isn't it enough that I would die for you? But of course that's nonsense, because I'm not I'm not alive. Just porcelain. Watch out for the spider.”
She stepped out of the path of a little green hunting spider that could fell a horse with one bite. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you.” The first was for saving her life, but that was his job. The second was for telling her that, in his own way, he loved her after all. “So I'm not foolish for loving you, am I?”
“Foolish you are. Foolish indeed. Foolish as the moons are foolish, to dance endlessly in the sky and never never never go home together.”
“I love you,” said Kiren, “better than I love the hope of being whole.”
And, you see, it was because she said that that the odd man came to the door of her father's house the very next day.
“I'm sorry,” said the servant. “You haven't an appointment.”
“Just tell him,” said the odd man, “that Irvass has come.”
Kiren's father came running down the stairs. “Oh, you can't take the salamander back!” he cried. “The cure has only begun!”
“Which I know much better than you do,” said Irvass. “The girl is in the woods?”
“With the salamander. What marvelous changes—but why are you here?”
“To finish the cure,” said Irvass.
“What?” asked Kiren's father. “Isn't the salamander itself the cure?”
“What were the words of your curse?” Irvass asked, instead of answering.
Kiren's father's face grew dour, but he forced himself to quietly say the very words. “May you never move a muscle in your life, until you lose someone you love as much as I loved her.”
“Well then,” said Irvass. “She now loves the salamander exactly as much as you loved your wife.”
It took only a moment for Kiren's father to realize. “No!” he cried out. “I can't let her suffer what I suffered!”
“It's the only cure. Isn't it better with a little piece of porcelain than if she had come to love you that much?”
And Kiren's father shuddered, and then wept, for he alone knew exactly how much pain she would suffer.
Irvass said nothing more, though the look he gave to Kiren's father might have been a pitying one. All he did was draw a rectangle in the soil of the garden, and place two stones within it, and mumble a few words.
And at that moment, out in the wood, the salamander said, “Very odd. Wasn't a wall here ever before. Never before. Here's a wall.” And it was a wall. It was just high enough that when Kiren reached as high as she could, her fingers were one inch short of touching the top.
The salamander tried to climb it, but found it slippery—though he had always been able to climb every other wall he found. “Magic. Must be magic,” The porcelain salamander mumbled.
So they circled the wall, hunting for a gate. There was none. It was all around them, though they had never entered it. And at no point did a tree limb cross the wall. They were trapped.
“I'm afraid,” said Kiren. “There's good magic and bad magic, but how could such a thing as this be a blessing? It must be a curse.” And the thought of a curse caused too much of the old misery to return, and she fought back the tears.
Fought back the tears until night, and then in the darkness, as the salamander scampered here and there, she could fight no longer.
“No,” wailed the salamander.
“I can't help crying,” she answered.
“I can't bear it,” he said. “It makes me cold.”
“I'll try to stop,” she said, and she tried, and she pretty much stopped except for a few whimpers and sniffles until morning brought the light, and she saw that the wall was exactly where it had been.
No, not exactly. For behind her the wall had crept up in the night, and was only a few feet away. Her prison was now not even a quarter the size it had been the day before.
“Not good,” said the salamander. “Oh, it could be dangerous.”
“I know,” she answered.
“You must get out,” said the salamander.
“And you,” she answered. “But how?”
And throughout the morning the wall played vicious taunting games with them, for whichever way neither of them was looking, the wall would creep up a foot or two. Since the salamander was faster, and moved constantly, he watched three sides. “And you hold the other in place.” But Kiren couldn't help blinking, and anytime the salamander looked away the wall twitched, and by noon their prison was only ten feet square.
“Getting pretty tight here,” said the salamander.
“Oh, salamander, can't I throw you over the wall?”
“We could try that, and I could run and get help—”
And so they tried. But though she used every ounce of strength she had, the wall seemed to leap up and catch him and send him sliding back down to the ground. Inside.
Soon she was exhausted, and the salamander said, “No more.” Even as they had been trying, the walls had shrunk, and now the space was only five feet square. “Getting cramped,” said the salamander as he raced around the tiny space remaining. “But I know the only solution.”
“Tell me!” Kiren cried.
“I think,” said the salamander, “that if you had something you could stand on, you could climb out.”
“How could I?” she asked. “The wall won't let anything out!”
“I think,” said the salamander, “that the wall only won't let me out. Because the birds are flying back and forth, and the wall doesn't catch them.” It was true. A bird was singing in a nearby tree; it flew across just afterward, as if to prove the salamander's point. “I'm not alive, you see,” said the salamander. “I'm moving only by magic. So you could get out.”
“But what would I stand on?”
“Me,” said the salamander.
“You?” she asked. “But you move so quickly—”
“For you,” he said, “I'll hold still.”
“No!” she cried. “No, no!” she screamed.
But the salamander stood at the edge of the wall, and he was only a statue in porcelain, hard and stiff and cold.
Kiren only wept for a moment, for then the wall behind her began to push at her, and her prison was only three feet square. The salamander had given his life so she could climb out. She ought at least to try.
So she tried. Standing on the salamander, she could reach the top of the wall. By standing tiptoe, she could get a grip on the top. And by using every bit of strength she had in her, she was able to force her body to the top and gradually heave herself over.
She fell in a heap on the ground. And in that moment, that very moment, two things happened. The walls shrank quickly until they were only a pillar, and then they disappeared completely, taking the salamander with them. And all the normal, natural strength of an eleven-year-old child came to Kiren, and she was able to run. She was able to leap. She was able to swing from the tree branches.
The strength was in her as suddenly as strong wine, and she could not lie on the ground. She jumped to her feet, and the movement was so strong she nearly fell over. She ran, leaped over brooks, clambered up into the trees as high as she could climb. The curse had ended. She was free.
But even normal children grow tired. And as she slowed down, she was no longer caught up in her own strength. And she remembered the porcelain salamander, and what he had done for her.
They found her that afternoon, weeping miserably into a pile of last year's leaves.
“You see,” said Irvass, who had insisted on leading the way in the search—which is why they found her immediately—“You see, she has her strength, and the curse is ended.”
“But her heart is broken,” said her father as he gathered his little girl into his arms.
“Broken?” asked Irvass. “It should not be. For the porcelain salamander was never alive.”
“Yes he was!” she shouted. “He spoke to me! He gave his life for me!”
“He did all that,” said Irvass. “But think. For all the time the magic was on him, he could never, never rest. Do you think he never got tired?”
“Of course he didn't.”
“Yes he did,” said Irvass. “Now he can rest. But more than rest. For when he stopped moving and froze forever in one position, what was going through his mind?”
Irvass stood up and turned to leave. But only a few steps away, he turned back. “Kiren,” he said.
“I want my salamander,” she answered, her voice an agony of sobs.
“Oh, he would have become boring by and by,” said Irvass. “He would have ceased to amuse you, and you would have avoided him. But now he is a memory. And, speaking of memory, remember that he also has memory, frozen as he is.”
It was scant comfort then, for eleven-year-olds are not very philosophical. But when she grew older, Kiren remembered. And she knew that wherever the porcelain salamander was, he lived in one frozen, perfect moment—the moment when his heart was so full of love—
No, not love. The moment when he decided, without love, that it would be better for his life, such as it was, to end than to have to watch Kiren's life end.
It is a moment that can be lived with for eternity. And as Kiren grew older, she knew that such moments come rarely to people, and last only a moment, while the porcelain salamander would never lose it.
And as for Kiren—she became known, though she never sought fame, as the most Beautiful of the Beautiful People, and more than one of the rare wanderers from across the sea or from beyond Rising came only to see her, and talk to her, and draw her face in their minds to keep it with them forever.
And when she talked, her hands always moved, always danced in the air. Never stopped moving at all, it seemed, and they were white and lustrous as deep-enameled porcelain, and her smile was as bright as the moons, and came back to her face as constantly as the sea, and those who knew her well could almost see her gaze keep flickering about the room or about the garden, as if she watched a bright, quick animal scamper by.
Ah-Cheu was a woman of the great kingdom of Ch'in, a land of hills and valleys, a land of great wealth and dire poverty. But Ah-Cheu was a middle person, neither rich nor poor, neither old nor young, and her husband's farm was half in the valley and half on the hill. Ah-Cheu had a sister older than her, and a sister younger than her, and one lived thirty leagues to the north, and the other thirty leagues to the south. “I am a middle woman,” Ah-Cheu boasted once, but her husband's mother rebuked her, saying, “Evil comes to the middle, and good goes out to the edges.”
Every year Ah-Cheu put a pack on her back and journeyed for a visit either to the sister to the north or to the sister to the south. It took her three days to make the journey, for she did not hurry. But one year she did not make the journey, for she met a dragon on the road.
The dragon was long and fine and terrible, and Ah-Cheu immediately knelt and touched her forehead to the road and said, “Oh, dragon, spare my life!”
The dragon only chuckled deep in his throat and said, “Woman, what do they call you?”
Not wishing to tell her true name to the dragon, she said, “I am called Middle Woman.”
“Well, Middle Woman, I will give you a choice. The first choice is to have me eat you here in the road. The second choice is to have me grant you three wishes.”
Surprised, Ah-Cheu raised her head. “But of course I take the second choice. Why do you set me a problem with such an easy solution?”
“It is more amusing,” said the dragon, “to watch human beings destroy themselves than to overpower them quickly.”
“But how can three wishes destroy me?”
“Make a wish, and see.”
Ah-Cheu thought of many things she might wish for, but was soon ashamed of her greed. “I wish,” she finally said, having decided to ask for only what she truly needed, “for my husband's farm to always produce plenty for all my family to eat.”
“It shall be done,” said the dragon, and he vanished, only to reappear a moment later, smiling and licking his lips. “I have done,” he said, “exactly what you asked—I have eaten all your family, and so your husband's farm, even if it produces nothing, will always produce plenty for them to eat.”
Ah-Cheu wept and mourned and cursed herself for being a fool, for now she saw the dragon's plan. Any wish, however innocent, would be turned against her.
“Think all you like,” said the dragon, “but it will do you no good. I have had lawyers draw up legal documents eight feet long, but I have found the loopholes.”
Then Ah-Cheu knew what she had to ask for. “I wish for all the world to be exactly as it was one minute before I left my home to come on this journey.”
The dragon looked at her in surprise. “That's all? That's all you want to wish for?”
“Yes,” said Ah-Cheu. “And you must do it now.”
And suddenly she found herself in her husband's house, putting on her pack and bidding good-bye to her family. Immediately she set down the pack.
“I have changed my mind,” she said. “I am not going.”
Everyone was shocked. Everyone was surprised. Her husband berated her for being a changeable woman. Her mother-in-law denounced her for having forgotten her duty to her sisters. Her children pouted because she had always brought them each a present from her journeys to the north and south. But Ah-Cheu was firm. She would not risk meeting the dragon again.
And when the furor died down, Ah-Cheu was far more cheerful than she had ever been before, for she knew that she had one wish left, the third wish, the unused wish. And if there were ever a time of great need, she could use it to save herself and her family.
One year there was a fire, and Ah-Cheu was outside the house, with her youngest child trapped within. Almost she used her wish, but then thought, Why use the wish, when I can use my arms? And she ducked low, and ran into the house, and saved the boy, though it singed off all her hair. And she still had her son, and she still had her wish.
One year there was a famine, and it looked like all the world would starve. Ah-Cheu almost used her wish, but then thought, Why use the wish, when I can use my feet? And she wandered up into the hills, and came back with a basket of roots and leaves, and with such food she kept her family alive until the Emperor's men came with wagons full of rice. And she still had her family, and she still had her wish.
And in another year there was a great flood, and all the homes were swept away, and as Ah-Cheu and her son's baby sat upon the roof, watching the water eat away the walls of the house, she almost used her wish to get a boat so she could escape. But then she thought, Why use the wish, when I can use my head? And she took up the boards from the roof and walls, and with her skirts she tied them into a raft large enough for the baby, and setting the child upon it she swam away, pushing the raft until they reached high ground and safety. And when her son found her alive, he wept with joy, and said, “Mother Ah-Cheu, never has a son loved his mother more!”
And Ah-Cheu had her posterity, and yet still she had her wish.
And then it was time for Ah-Cheu to die, and she lay sick and frail upon a bed of honor in her son's house, and the women and children and old men of the village came to keen for her and honor her as she lay dying. “Never has there been a more fortunate woman than Ah-Cheu.” they said. “Never has there been a kinder, a more generous, a more godfavored woman!” And she was content to leave the world, because she had been so happy in it.
And on her last night, as she lay alone in darkness, she heard a voice call her name.
“Middle Woman,” said the voice, and she opened her eyes, and there was the dragon.
“What do you want with me?” she asked. “I'm not much of a morsel to eat now, I'm afraid.”
But then she saw the dragon looked terrified, and she listened to what he had to say.
“Middle Woman,” said the dragon, “you have not used your third wish.”
“I never needed it.”
“Oh, cruel woman! What a vengeance you take! In the long run, I never did you any harm! How can you do this to me?”
“But what am I doing?” she asked.
“If you die, with your third wish unused, then I, too, will die!” he cried. “Maybe that doesn't seem so bad to you, but dragons are usually immortal, and so you can believe me when I say my death would cut me off with most of my life unlived.”
“Poor dragon,” she said. “But what have I to wish for?”
“Immortality,” he said. “No tricks. I'll let you live forever.”
“I don't want to live forever,” she said. “It would make the neighbors envious.”
“Great wealth, then, for your family.”
“But they have all they need right now.”
“Any wish!” he cried. “Any wish, or I will die!”
And so she smiled, and reached out a frail old hand and touched his supplicating claw, and said, “Then I wish a wish, dragon. I wish that all the rest of your life should be nothing but happiness for you and everyone you meet.”
The dragon looked at her in surprise, and then in relief, and then he smiled and wept for joy. He thanked her many times, and left her home rejoicing.
And that night Ah-Cheu also left her home, more subtly than the dragon, and far less likely to return, but no less merrily for all that.