Swan Sister (18 page)

In bed with him that night, like every night,

her sister at their feet, she ends her tale,

then waits. Her sister quickly takes her cue

and says, “I cannot sleep. Another, please?”

Scheharazade takes one small nervous breath,

and she begins, “In faraway Peking

there lived a lazy youth with his mama.

His name? Aladdin. His papa was dead. . . .”

She tells them how a dark magician came,

said he’s Aladdin’s uncle, with a plan.

He took the boy out to a lonely place,

Gave him a ring he said would keep him safe,

down to a cavern filled with precious stones,

“Bring me the lamp!” and when Aladdin does,

in darkness he’s abandoned and entombed. . . .

There, now.

Aladdin locked beneath the earth,
        she stops, her husband hooked for one more night.

Next day

She cooks

She feeds her kids

She dreams . . .

Knowing Aladdin’s trapped,

and that her tale

has brought her just one day.

What happens now?

She wishes that she knew.

It’s only when that evening comes around

and husband says, just as he always says,

“Tomorrow morning, I shall have your head,”

when Dunyazade, her sister, asks, “But please,

what of Aladdin?” Only then, she knows. . . .

And in a cavern hung about with jewels

Aladdin rubs his lamp. The Genie comes.

The story tumbles on. Aladdin gets

the princess and a palace made of pearls.

Watch now, the dark magician’s coming back:

“New lamps for old,” he’s singing in the street.

Just when Aladdin has lost everything,

she stops.

He’ll let her live another night.

Her sister and her husband fall asleep.

She lies awake and stares up in the dark,

playing the variations in her mind:

the ways to give Aladdin back his world,

his palace, his princess, his everything.

And then she sleeps. The tale will need an end,

but now it melts to dreams inside her head.

She wakes

She feeds the kids

She combs her hair

She goes down to the market

Buys some oil . . .

The oil seller pours it out for her,

decanting it

from an enormous jar.

She thinks,

What if you hid a man in there?

She buys some sesame as well that day.

Her sister says, “He hasn’t killed you yet.”

“Not yet.” Unspoken waits the phrase “He will.”

In bed she tells them of the magic ring

Aladdin rubs. Slave of the Ring appears . . .

Magician dead, Aladdin saved, she stops.

But once the story’s done, the teller’s dead,

her only hope’s to start another tale.

Scheharazade inspects her store of words;

half-built, half-baked ideas and dreams combine

with jars just big enough to hide a man,

and she thinks,
Open Sesame,
and smiles.

“Now, Ali Baba was a righteous man,

but he was poor . . .” she starts, and she’s away,

and so her life is safe for one more night,

until she bores him, or invention fails.

She does not know where any tale waits

before it’s told. (No more do I.)

But forty thieves sounds good, so forty

thieves it is. She prays she’s bought another clutch of days.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

N
EIL
G
AIMAN
says, “In
The Arabian Nights,
Scheharazade is married to a king who is going to kill her in the morning. She has her sister join her in the bedroom and ask her for a story—and Scheharazade tells stories of such magic and suspense that the king does not kill her, because then he would never know what happened next. She keeps her stories going for a thousand and one nights, and even manages secretly to give birth to several children before she is finally done and the king changes his mind.

“I have a number of stories to tell this week. No one’s going to cut off my head if inspiration fails. At least, I hope they’re not. I wish I knew where the inspiration comes from, but I don’t, and perhaps it’s wisest not to inspect too closely.

“There are two stories from
The Arabian Nights
in the poem: ‘Aladdin and His Magic Lamp’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.’”

N
EIL
G
AIMAN
is the author of the
Sandman
comic book series and the adult novels
Neverwhere, Stardust,
and
American Gods
. His first novel for readers of all ages,
Coraline
, was published in 2002. He has found that so far most of the kids who have read it have enjoyed it as an adventure, while the adults who read it have the kind of nightmares from which they wake up screaming, which proves that there is some kind of justice in the world.

My sister, Rachel, was born wrong. There was a mistake in
every cell in her body. She lived for a while in an incubator at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City and looked so tiny in her glass nest. “She’s our little swan,” said my mother. Rachel was wild and beautiful and seemed ready to fly away. She stared upward, each of her eyes just one drop of pale blue. “Hello,” I whispered. “Don’t you want to stay with me?” I was eleven and had been waiting for a sister for a long time. She was rose pink. Her head was like a soap bubble, the kind that has panes the color of a rainbow on it. My father put a toy elephant on the top of the glass, to lasso her with its trunk if she tried to float off before we said good-bye. She was going to leave us very soon.

One night while holding Rachel I saw my uncle Jack tapping on the outside of the window of the intensive care unit. He and my mother had not spoken in years. He walks fast, talks fast, reaches high; my mother is slow. She’s a young spirit with no sense of time. Sometimes instead of going to work, she decides to go to Central Park and sketch the trees, and my job is to call the pet store where she’s a cashier to say she has the flu. Thin as one of her drawing pencils, she forgets to untangle her short black hair. Humming, staring into space, she escapes in her mind to places I can’t always reach, and when my father comes home from working at his fruit stand, he helps me make tomato soup filled with carrot pieces cut into daisies. Mother taught me how to twirl around until I’m too dizzy to stand; she made us both necklaces from chains of paper clips.

Uncle Jack is an old spirit who decided he didn’t have the patience for us. But there he was in the hospital with his arms around Mother. Rachel had worked a miracle in summoning him back to us. And suddenly our mother was calm and strong, so the little swan must have performed wonders inside of her as well. Uncle Jack was the one to cry. Mother said only, “She’s my joy for as many hours or days as I have her.”

“You have me now too,” he said.

When Rachel was allowed to come home, I invented a plan. I would show her New York. It was the city of my birth, and my mother’s birth, and my father’s. If Rachel saw how astonishing it was and how much I loved it, she
would decide she could not possibly leave us. We lived in our own small nest on West Eighteenth Street, high enough to see the river turn into melted silver when the sun went down. I held Rachel up to our window and said, “It’s so exciting here your heart won’t ever stop beating!” The clouds were like white wings drifting along above the wide world, bird-high.

The doctor said it was a fine idea to help Rachel enjoy every single minute. We were given permission to take her out. She had a tube attached from her nose to an oxygen machine that was green and thin and had wheels and a handle so that we could push it around. Mother offered to steer the machine and I could carry Rachel. One bright morning, the light dripping gold, we bundled her in a blanket covered with sailboats and took the elevator down fifteen flights. The first man to fall in love with my sister, other than my father and Uncle Jack, was Rafael, the doorman. “Who is this angel?” he shouted when we crossed the lobby.

He took my sister from me and said, “She’s a sweetheart.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mother, happy as a breeze. “Jessica and I are going to show her the city.”

“Will you marry me?” Rafael asked Rachel.

Her face was too weak to smile, but she politely shined some light off her eyes.

We made a strange parade, Mother wheeling the machine and my sister in my arms and the tube connecting her to the canister of air, as we strolled in slow motion
down West Eighteenth and stopped at Tillmore Bakery Supplies, with its ballerinas for cakes, candles with sparkles, and sugar roses. She would have no birthdays, but we wanted her to see a giant store that held out the promise of every celebration that anyone could imagine. In the narrow aisles, shoppers stepped aside as I showed Rachel the bins of confetti, party hats (I put one on), and the books on how to make wedding cakes that looked like white temples. I showed her cookie cutters shaped like half-moons and turkeys. Rachel slept. “Please try and pay attention,” I said. It was almost like our first sisterly quarrel. Mother giggled and took the party hat off my head and pretended it was a megaphone that she held to her mouth to boom out, “Earth to Rachel!”

My sister perked up and grabbed my finger with her right hand as we went back onto the street. Summer was already tipping toward fall. The leaves were turning their usual fire colors, and they scuttled through the streets until people, or taxis and cars, crushed out all that fire under their feet or tires. Maybe it was Rachel’s second miracle (or third, fourth, one hundredth) that when people saw us walking at half-speed with the oxygen machine and my sister attached to it, instead of being in a hurry (like my uncle Jack), they also slowed down and said, “Oh, heavens,” or “Oh, my,” the way people sound the first time they see a tide pool—how pretty, how easily crushed.