Goldenland Past Dark (7 page)

“Aren’t you hot?” he asked, remembering what Brunhilde had said—
her skin can’t breathe like a normal girl’s
.

“Nah, I’m okay. You’re freezing.” She ran her hand over his. “Brr.”

“I’ll be fine. At least I’ve got dry clothes on, now.” Webern thought of the melting ice cubes. “Do you always sleep in the water?”

“I try not to. It ends up drying me out even more.” Nepenthe scratched the back of one hand. “But sometimes it’s the only way I can doze off, you know? At school I had a bunch of electric fans, but there’s no place to plug them in here.”

Webern took a mug from her and sipped his coffee. “Did you go to a boarding school?”

“All girls, too. Don’t remind me.” Nepenthe lit a clove. “Want one?”

“I’m good.” Webern watched her face in the flickering light. Fissures lined it like a palm. “Does it hurt when you smile?”

“Why all the questions, kiddo?” She wasn’t smiling now. “Am I really so strange?”

“You can ask me stuff, too. I didn’t mean it like an inquisition.”

“Great. Does it hurt when I do this?” Nepenthe punched his hump, not that hard, but with a closed fist. Webern rubbed it.

“Yeah, it hurts. Thanks a lot, Nepenthe.”

“You deserved it, you dope.” She held her crackled hands out toward the fire. “I just hate how people do that—ask me questions about my skin. Like that’s the ‘real me.’ Did you ever read that comic
Undetectable Girl
, Bernie?”

“Sounds familiar.” Webern conjured up the image: a translucent ghost-girl in a cape, perched on the observation deck of a skyscraper. “I was more into Space Ace Grin McCase.”

“Figures. Guys don’t like comics about women unless they’re tied to the railroad tracks or getting raped by Martian octopi—chauvinists. It’s a degraded art form anyway. I don’t know why we’re even talking about it.” Nepenthe stared down into her coffee cup, then took a drag from her clove instead. “But what I was going to say is, sometimes I pretend to be Undetectable Girl, when I’m out there in the ring. I look out at the audience, and I get this tingling feeling all over, like Marla Blaine does when she twists the jewel on her radiation pendant and starts disappearing. Because they can’t see me, you know. It’s just my skin.” She blew smoke out her nose like a dragon. “What a cliché, right? Sometimes I don’t even feel invisible. I feel like I’m not anywhere at all.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Oh, come on. You never feel that way?”

Webern hesitated. “When I’m performing, it’s not really me—I mean, I guess sometimes I pretend I’m someone else, too.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Someone I used to know when I was a kid. A friend. He was funnier than I was—crazy, almost. He did things I could never do. Nothing scared him.”

“Whereas you’re a paranoiac who flees at the first sign of danger?”

“Exactly. Nice of you to remind me.”

“Why’d you run off like that anyway? Can’t you take a joke?”

“You upset me.”

“
You
upset
me
. Jesus God, Bernie.” Nepenthe looked away. “I didn’t mean to ruin your goddamn birthday.”

“You didn’t ruin it.” Webern looked at the sand between them—just a few inches, but it might as well have been a whole desert. He sipped his coffee again and watched Nepenthe smoke. Her hair was down, and now a chunk of it hung loose, covering the side of her face. Impulsively, he reached over and tucked it behind her ear. All of a sudden, there was no distance between them at all: Webern felt Nepenthe’s warm, rough face brush against his, and then just as quickly, it was gone.

Webern remembered little of what they said after that. They sat for hours under the blanket, but the words they spoke seemed far less important than their interlaced fingers and the places where their knees touched. Nepenthe read Webern a poem she’d written in honour of his birthday, but later he could only recall the poem’s shape, its hard sweetness like a green Jolly Rancher on her tongue. They talked about nothing, about the show and Webern’s act and if he would get a driver’s license now that he was sixteen. After a long time, they stopped talking at all. Nepenthe’s head fell to rest on Webern’s hump, and he left it there, feeling her breath come, slow and warm, in waves on his neck. It comforted him, but he wasn’t even close to sleeping. The feeling that surged through him reminded him of the excitement he’d once felt on the mornings of his birthdays—the secret knowledge that now there was nothing between him and what he’d waited for. It was only as the sun came up over the ocean that it occurred to him: his birthday was already over.

Years before Webern’s accident
, before he was even old enough to go to school, his mother read him picture books in the afternoons before she put him down for naps. Webern’s mother could barely stand to let sleep separate her from her little boy, and the picture books were a kind of procrastination, a way to hold off the lonely quiet of his dreams. She read him stories about dwarves and pirates and goblins and grails while he leaned against her, lured by her voice into the depths of the illustrations. In one picture, a frail boy and girl crept hand in hand through a night forest. The forest gleamed with eyes. Every time Webern looked at this illustration, he tried to count all of the eyes before his mother turned the page. Every time he failed.

Webern Bell was a solemn, methodical little boy, with an old man’s frown and a pale round face. Only his mother could coax him to grin, or tickle him into fits of giddy, toylike joy. Sometimes Webern even presented well-planned jokes for her approval.

“What did the cat say to the hammer, Mommy?”

“I don’t know Bernie, what?”

“Me-
ow!
”

Webern’s hair was slow to grow, so for the first three years of his life, his head was naked and shiny as a wigless china doll’s. This suited him, since his mother dressed him like a doll anyway. Webern wore sailor suits and cowboy shirts, bow ties and silk pyjamas. Later, when he learned to ride his bicycle around the neighbourhood, he started to come home with black eyes and bloody noses. Given the choice between her son’s face and his wardrobe, Webern’s mother chose to protect the former, but they both cried when he tried on his first pair of dungarees.

But when Webern was still too small to go to school, he spent all his days in the company of his mother, with no scabby little boys or sticky little girls to knock him down and spoil his nice clothes. In the mornings, he peeled himself from his sun-ripened bed and padded through the house. By this time of day, his father and sisters had already left for work and school, and the rooms were silent and wondrous. In his red robe and slippers, he felt like a little king. His mother stood at the kitchen stove in a ruffled apron, wearing pink high heels even though they were inside, and sizzled breakfast in a coal-black skillet. She listened to his dreams with gentle amazement. When Webern finished telling of yellow stars trapped in jelly jars and squirrels who slept in hammocks, of cold blue palaces carved from ice and a circus on a sailboat, she always explained, with barely contained excitement, what they would do that day.

On Webern’s fourth birthday, his mother took him downtown, to the toy store on the corner of Oak and Main. The store was part salesroom, part doll hospital, and Webern liked to look at the ceramic limbs, the coloured glass eyes, the tiny toupees and the vials of paints that the owner left scattered on his workbench, which resembled a messy operating table.

Webern and his mother jingled in the door. The toy doctor nodded to them from his perch behind the counter. With a pair of small, sharp scissors, he was amputating a cracked porcelain arm from a baby doll’s overstuffed body.

“Lovely day we’re having, eh, Mrs. Bell?” he said without raising his head. To help him with his work, he wore a miner’s cap. A bright light beamed down from his forehead onto the ceramic limb. “How’s sonny boy, there?”

“Oh, Bernie here’s fine. He just turned four today.”

“Well! You’re a big boy now, aren’tcha?”

“Bernie, sing Mr. Saul the song I taught you. Go ahead, don’t be shy.”

The toy doctor looked up with interest, and the light from his miner’s cap shone into Webern’s eyes. Webern retreated behind his mother’s legs. Today he wore a red beanie with a propeller on top, and he imagined it revolving faster and faster, carrying him up into the endless blue of the sky.

“M, ’n’ N, O, P,” he mumbled, reaching up for his mother’s hand. She squeezed his and smiled down proudly.

“Bernie’s learned the alphabet,” she explained.

“He’s a sly one, all right,” observed the toy doctor. He lobbed the doll arm toward a trash can. It shattered on the floor. “But I say, how do you like this weather we’ve been having, Mrs. Bell? Hot enough for ya?”

“It is unseasonable,” she agreed, fanning herself with one hand.

While the grown-ups talked, Webern slipped away to look at the toys. Most stores on Main Street had big picture windows and glaring overhead lights, but cobwebby shadows draped the doll hospital even in the middle of the day. Webern rolled a red fire truck back and forth on a dusty shelf. He played with the marionettes until their strings tangled into impossible snarls. He stacked the geometrical coloured blocks to build a rainbow castle, and he wound up all the wind-up toys. These little metal creatures held a peculiar fascination for him. The seal slapped its grey flippers together; the monkey pedaled a tricycle; the fat cat slapped a coin into its mouth with one greedy paw. They were the best toys, really; the same gears that turned the hands of clocks moved their insides with a kind of life. Webern watched them for a long time. Then he snuck back to his favourite part of the store.

The toy doctor kept his miniatures in glass cases that hung from the wall and glowed like magic aquariums. These cases looked like tiny rooms; some even had rugs and wallpaper and little closed curtains where the windows would be. In the first room, the toy doctor had arranged a shrunken feast. Webern stood there on his tiptoes to see the three-tier wedding cake, the stripey bags of popcorn, the fat hamburgers, the martini glasses, and, in the centre of it all, the roast pig, splayed on a silver plate with a gumdrop in his mouth. The second room looked like a museum. On the walls, paintings the size of postage stamps—
Whistler’s Mother
, the
Mona Lisa
—hung beside a medieval tapestry, intricately woven to depict a unicorn and a satyr frolicking beside a well. But the third room was Webern’s favourite. This room looked like a little boy’s bedroom, and it was heaped with toys.

On the floor, an exploded jack-in-the-box craned his accordion neck over a battleground of tin soldiers, while nearby a wooden train derailed. Meanwhile, in a makeshift fort of blankets and pillows, teddy bears and rabbits conspired against a pair of arrogant robots, with stiff straight arms and orange light-bulb eyes. Tiddly-winks lay like confetti around an auto show of sleek race cars, and a rocking horse reared on its hind legs, eyes wild with excitement. On a disorderly shelf in the back of the room, picture books stacked and tilted upon each other, the titles on their spines already dimly familiar to Webern’s illiterate eye: RUMPLESTILTSKIN, PETER PAN, THE LONELY ISLAND. Above it all hung a painting of a clown balanced on a unicycle, spangled arms spread, harlequin suit sparkling and swirling like an impossible constellation.

Beneath this painting lay a bright blue bed, usually neatly made under a comforter dappled with rocket ships. But today, pressing his nose to the glass, Webern saw something in the miniature room that he’d never seen before. Tucked snugly under the covers lay a tiny boy with smooth gold hair and a face a lot like Webern’s.

For a second, Webern thought that the little boy might be a doll. But, as Webern’s mouth fell open in amazement, the little boy’s mouth also opened wide, into a slow sleepy yawn. He stretched his arms out, then swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He put on a little leather cap with a feather in its brim and a pair of white knee socks. He was already wearing lederhosen.

Webern stood there, open-mouthed, unable even to gasp, as the little boy buckled on his heavy German shoes and reached down to touch his toes. But when the boy stood up straight, snapped the straps of his lederhosen, and clicked his heels together, Webern found his voice again.

“Knock knock, who’s there?” Webern asked, bumping his finger clumsily against the glass.

“Dwayne,” said the little golden boy.

“Dwayne who?”

“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!”

The little golden boy danced a jig, and Webern clapped his hands.

“But what’s really your name?”

“Wags, Wags Verder, at your service.” Wags doffed his leather cap and bowed till his head touched the ground. Then he turned a somersault. Webern grinned.

“I’m Webern Bell.”

“Well, what do ya know? I wouldn’t have took you for a ding-a-ling.”

“Bernie?”

Webern turned around. His mother and the toy doctor were standing there, looking at him. The bulb on the miner’s cap shone right into his eyes.

“Bernie Bee, who’re you talking to?” Webern’s mother asked from inside the blinding light. Blinking away spots, Webern turned back around to the display case and started to point.

“I just met . . .”

But before Webern could show his mom and the toy doctor, Wags dove through the bedroom wall, leaving a boy-shaped hole. He zipped through the museum so fast, Whistler’s mother and the tapestry unicorn turned their heads to watch him go. Then he leap-frogged through the feast, stampeding over sandwiches, capsizing a cornucopia, and finally plunging into a pink punch bowl from which he did not emerge.

“Did you see him?” Webern cried. “Did you see how fast he ran?” His mother and the toy doctor exchanged a puzzled glance. Webern pounded on the glass case. “Hey, Wags! Wags, come back!” But the little boy in lederhosen would not return.

All the way home, Webern scowled out the car window. He sat with his arms folded over his chest and refused to play with the new toy—a ping-pong paddle with a red rubber ball attached—that his mother had bought when he refused to pick out any other present. He didn’t talk. For the first time, he had seen something that his mother hadn’t seen, that she hadn’t even believed in. Something was gone from his life now. He felt the new empty place like the socket of a missing tooth.

When they got home, it was time for Webern’s nap.

“Do you want me to read you a story?” his mother offered brightly. But Webern just shook his head and stomped up the stairs.

When she came up an hour later, she found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, looking at picture books. They lay open all around him. Webern was staring at the picture of the night forest from Hansel and Gretel when she sat down beside him.

“There are seventy-two eyes,” he said glumly. “I don’t think they’ll ever get home.”

Webern’s mother stroked his hair. It was starting to grow in, thin and fuzzy and mousy brown, like the fluff on a baby chickadee.

“You don’t believe me, that Wags was even there,” Webern continued. “You didn’t see him. You think I’m making him up.”

She pecked the top of his head. “I didn’t see him,” she admitted, “but I certainly don’t think you’re making him up.”

“How come I saw him and you didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Bernie. It’s a doll hospital. Maybe Wags is the ghost of a little doll who’s not born yet.”

Webern rubbed a finger against the glossy page of the picture book. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe he’s your conscience.”

“No, not that either.”

“He could be your guardian angel, you know. And maybe he won’t come back again until you really need him.”

Webern stared again at the picture of the night forest, the starved children and the fingers of dark trees, grasping. Then his sisters arrived home from school.

The morning after Webern’s sixteenth birthday began quietly enough. Webern watched the sunrise and saw the seagulls come to land on the beach. He looked at the boardwalk, which had finally shut down sometime in the very early morning, and the spiky, uneven skyline the rides made against the pale clouds. The spokes of the Ferris wheel looked delicate in the morning light, as faded as crosshatchings in a dime store comic book.

Webern was half nodding off at last, when around six thirty, he heard rustling in one of the circus tents. He nudged Nepenthe. She opened her eyes slowly, first one, then the other.

“They’re waking up,” he whispered.

“Jesus God. Thanks, Bernie.” Nepenthe wrapped the blanket around her and pulled part of it up over her head like a cowl. She squeezed his hand quickly. Her bare feet shushed in the sand as she hurried back to her tent.

Nepenthe had barely zipped the front flap when Brunhilde came gliding out to what was left of the campfire. In a grey dressing gown and ancient brocade slippers, she looked well-rested—she was probably the only one without a hangover this morning, since she didn’t drink. She looked disparagingly at the charred logs, then at Webern.

“Chilly, isn’t it.” Brunhilde had a way of saying a question so it wasn’t a question at all. She tossed the pillow she’d brought onto the ground and lowered herself down upon it. Pointedly, she breathed on her hands to warm them, then extended her palms toward the few remaining flames. “I see you returned, Webern.”

“Yeah. Dr. Show came and found me.” Webern dutifully got up and started piling more driftwood on the fire.

“I knew you would return when you had your fill of our attention. But he, he wanted to be a hero. Your rescuer. The two of you share a taste for amateur theatrics, it seems.”

The logs bumped, releasing a shower of sparks. Webern grimaced. Great. She was still mad about what happened at the diner. Well, if he had to choose sides between her and Dr. Show, he’d definitely made the right decision. He wasn’t going to let Brunhilde ruin his morning now. He thought about Nepenthe instead: her tousled hair, her emerald eyes, the way her hard grey feet had looked, burrowed in the sand. Involuntarily, he glanced at her green tent, and Brunhilde followed his gaze.