Rikki Ducornet - Brightfellow

Because before Asthma, his days were hollowed out as if by a spoon and he would enter them as a blind man enters an unknown hotel, tap-tapping across the threshold into the formless minutes and hours — and this before the night would steal up on him, the night with its own relentless demands. Cloaked in black feathers, his mouth full of clay, he would practice survival in the face of the incommensurable. But now!

He sees her moving in her own special way with her own special grace. And oh! The miracle! Asthma looks out — she always does this before going to sleep — for a glimpse of Peter Pan, an owl, a Martian, maybe a witch. And she tells them all: Protect me or let me be. Godless herself, this is the way Asthma prays each night: Protect me or let me be. Her mantra is now his own. Let me be as well, he says to the darkness. Let us both be. Tonight the things that bite and squall and snap and bark, fly from his mind and Charter is possessed by the best of the night. That is to say he sleeps.

But despite this sweet enchantment, he awakens in the dark hole of early morning — three o’clock, when once wolves were about, wild dogs. Often he awakens like this, his heart overleaping, and there is nothing to do but attend to the hour’s imperatives, abandon the bed, and move about. He enters the office, its eye on Asthma’s window, now darker than the sky, and it seems as he looks out that his heart, still pounding, is made of a muscled cable that reaches to that window and latches on, as a lamprey’s mouth latches on to the body of a fish. And he sits, immobile, as Asthma sleeps, the two of them stuck to the skin of the world as it spins. In this way Charter is no longer solitary but part of the fabric of things. He appreciates the night and its wandering points of light, its lawns turned the color of blackberry jelly, its gravel smoothed to tweed, its owls tearing at the throats of mice. He is bountiful with love.

But. . what is this? Someone is out and about wandering the Circle all alone. Barely visible, her form is distinctive, and her movements recognizable. It is the beautiful, bewildered Dr. Ash, barefoot and wearing a silk kimono. She sits down beneath the tree that marks the Circle’s navel and rolls her forehead from knee to knee, back and forth, back and forth, her hair billowing from her scalp like smoke. He watches as she folds herself into a ball and remains there like that for a very long time.

This is what I have learned during the early morning vigils. Depending on one’s state of mind, the hours pass painfully slowly, like a cold clay moving beneath the placid surface of a river — or they collapse all of a sudden and there is the sun (!) rising in the east and one’s own head awkwardly resting on the top of an unfamiliar desk and the day has come and Dr. Ash is not to be seen and Billy is already under sail and I can smell the coffee. .

Domestic life is his, unexpected and unprecedented. After an early breakfast, a new day unfolds. The brats have vanished and so he attends to the work at hand, the confection of a spurious dissertation, a marvelous creature of the mind, neither here nor there: a chimera, half fur, half feather. A thing feasible and resembling nothing else; a midnight blossom; an entire world in levitation; a thing both beaked and lipped. .

He is looking at Ancient Roots and Ways, at Vanderloon’s eccentric sketches of Quetzalcoatl sitting on top of a volcano. He appears to be wearing a garment made of leopard skin. He is looking at the sun-god of Babylon rising from the world-mountain, lightning leaping from the flesh of his outstretched arms. Quetzalcoatl is wearing an extravagant pronged hat and appears to be holding the toothed jawbone of a crocodile. Charter dreams over the zodiac belonging to the ancient Hebrews, in which Cancer finds its roots in a flood so powerful it causes the world to spin backwards — just as a crab moves backwards.

And this evasive movement of the crab appeals to him immensely. It opens a way. And Charter sees just what it is he will write about. The solution to his dilemma burns into his consciousness the way a meteor burns into the earth’s atmosphere, blazing a trail. He will invent a people unknown to all but Vanderloon. A decision that is monumental, exciting, and irrational. There is no reason why he should do this. But he has spent his life in hiding, fearful of discovery. Perhaps he fears honest scholarship can only fail, appear vastly flawed to those he will likely one day encounter. He fears it is inevitable that sooner or later he will have to justify himself. He wishes he had paid more attention to Axel’s admonitions. Axel who was clearly distressed Stub had not yet read Coming of Age in Samoa. Axel who had once suggested that Stub had entered the study of Verner Vanderloon as others enter a religious order.

Yet in a moment Charter is off and running. He will invent the papers, notes, some rare editions unavailable but for Vanderloon’s own personal library, stowed away and moldering in boxes abandoned by the very institution he had devoted his life to, revealing or having revealed the mysteries of the human imagination to how many generations of eager minds.

Vision is one thing, Vanderloon had liked to say, and observation is another. When on Easter Island he had learned of the bird’s superiority over the fish, he understood in a flash what informed that entire culture. He saw that the Easter Islanders were themselves like raptors, snapping away at one another until there was nothing left. Easter Island, Vanderloon wrote in Rules of Rage, is the mirror of all that is wrong with a species that again and again snaps up the fish rather than attempt to understand it. Today Charter puzzles over this. He thinks he does not want to be either one. He wants to survive but not snap anybody up in the process. A hare is what he wants to be. The one that with a leap, disappears.

That evening when Billy hands him a slice of quiche, Charter is ready to speak about his dissertation.

“It is an unusual project,” he begins. He gazes at the quiche, gemmy with scallions, peppers, cubes of ham. “Perhaps you will find it odd. .”

“No! No! Surely not!”

“Well, for one thing, Vanderloon is obscure. Unacknowledged. You must know that when he retired he was given one small pewter bowl—”

“No! How dreadful! The OED is customary, or some rare volume. For the women perhaps a sterling-silver charger—”

“Charger?”

“A. . shallow dish. A big one. But a small pewter bowl! How terrible! How is this possible?”

“Five people showed up at the dinner. The table was set for thirty.”

“No!”

“Yes. Yes! So. . there is that. ”

“I’m speechless. It is true I didn’t even go myself!”

“And, well, the material that interests me is obscure. I am reading unpublished and scattered notes. I am reading little-known publications, small editions, many bound in paper. It may be that much of this exists only in those boxes in the library. Some printed on paper of such poor quality it crumbles at the touch.”

“Fabulous! Charter! This is exciting!”

“But wait! It gets worse!”

“Worse!” Billy clasps his hands. “Worse! Wonderful! Please go on!”

“Much of my personal interest has to do with a small island, so small as to be ignored on most maps. And, well, I have been there—”

“You have! Are you saying you and Loon? No one else?”

“No one else. Which is why—”

“Yes! Yes! I understand! One might say the two of you belong to a very select club!”