Rikki Ducornet - Brightfellow

Once upstairs, Charter sees Asthma enter her room and begin to play with her town and its little animals. He thinks that if he could be at play beside her, he would recover all that is lost, all that was taken from him — so long ago now — when Jenny was sent away and all the games they had played together were reduced to the worst feeling of absence, with all the beauties of the world contained within that absence. Later, when he lies in bed, he recalls the long walk he took alone in the winter’s snow to the madhouse on the hill. How he had asked for Jenny, had himself been asked for his name, his address. How the nice lady had asked, “Is Jenny not with you?” How when he walked to the door, sad and confused, he had seen the strangest-looking lady in the world pry her nostril with her tongue.

“Is she not with you? Is Jenny not with you?” This was how Jenny had been taken from him. Inexplicably and with a suddenness. When he had put the question to his mother, she had said: Because. Then, when pressed: Because Jenny was beyond the pale.

That night Charter dreams of the Hindu ascetic Cyavana, who was said to meditate within a hill of ants, fully submerged but for his eyes. Vanderloon writes that Cyavana’s eyes burned like embers, burned holes in the fabric of the days and the nights. When Charter awakens to the smell of bacon he thinks it is time he finds himself a good pair of binoculars. His fork full of scrambled eggs, he asks Billy over breakfast if there is someone who teaches ornithology. There is. Professor Zim. Timothy. A good sort. Something of a bird himself, trim and quick. But why? Owls, Charter says. There are so many. And the other birds. Much for study, I would think.

After Billy goes off to “hunt and gather,” Charter finds Dr. Zim’s address in the phone book, and after a fifteen-minute canter descends into a lilac grove and sees the house, white with olive trim, quiet, unlocked. He makes the rounds before stepping into a small, cool kitchen as white as a hen’s egg, its floors and counters gleaming. Everything in the house has a shine to it, is silvered with light, pristine. As he stands stricken with admiration in the kitchen, he thinks of all the many ways there are to live. The mole is happy underground, in its chamber carpeted with grass; the arctic fox dwells in mazes as vast as palaces; the weasel sleeps in deep hollows made by the roots of old trees; and the puffin will chase the rabbit from its den to claim it for himself. (There was a time in high school, before he ran off, when Charter read about different kinds of dwellings, and little else. He knows about the nests of wasps, the hives of bees, the places where the dung beetle hunkers down, the eagle, the carp. Writes Vanderloon: The house is man’s carapace, his pod, his shell, his coffin, or his cradle. )

But! The house of the ornithologist! There are books, hundreds of them, each one jacketed in white paper, its title carefully inked on the spine. A small white plastic radio gleams on the spotless kitchen counter — also white — the walls are white and every single surface is alive with light, clear of clutter, accessible. There is not a single web, nor ball of dust; there are no shadows!

Charter steps over to the ornithologist’s small refrigerator and pours himself a tall glass of orange juice. He drinks, rinses the glass, dries it carefully, and returns it to its shelf. And then he approaches the desk. It, too, is in order. There is a pale gray Olivetti with green keys, a stack of white paper, a clay mug full of sharpened pencils, a pen, and a bottle of ink. The ornithologist’s house! Everything appears to be levitating and illuminated. Everything, that is, except for a very sturdy pair of binoculars — Brunchhausers! At a powerful 7 x 50. He lifts them by their strap from the back of a chair and slips them over his head. They thump against his heart. He stands empowered and alone in the kitchen, washed by the afternoon sun. It occurs to him that he has built his life from fragments belonging to others. From things stolen, lost, or abandoned. That he has cobbled together a life in the company of things devoid of any meaning beyond their utility. That his life has no aesthetic unity. That there is no nobility to a life lived with such urgency as his, that he is no better than any hairy mammal carpeting its burrow with grass, and even now, in Billy’s safekeeping, he is a dubious boy, and solitary.

Charter thinks that although Billy’s house is perfectly accommodating, it has no uniqueness. Everything is replaceable, which is why it is an easy place for a serial interloper to set up shop. But the ornithologist’s house! It belongs to the ornithologist! Just as it belongs to the instant, the instant that is eternal and serene—

Charter fears he is only a stargazer who sees light from things no longer there. The ornithologist lives in the light of the moment in a way unfamiliar to Charter, perhaps unknowable to him, and this is terrifying! For a moment he hears a chiming in his head, a familiar vortex of sound, and falls into a hole, the unfathomable hole that exists between one instant and the next.

Somewhere above him the springs of a mattress creak and then someone — the ornithologist! — is moving around upstairs. Charter leaps as from a dream and takes off, veering at once in the direction of a path that rises toward the road to campus. He picks up speed and runs easily, joyfully, the Brunchhausers knocking at his chest: they give him purpose, they give him weight.

Cyavana! thinks Charter as he runs. Cyavana! Cloaked in earth and swarming with ants, his eyes blazing. . Vanderloon writes: Cyavana in perfect disguise and isolation, relentlessly transgressive as he gazes upon the world. His looking is so like a hurricane in its intensity, it sends the world reeling, and when that world comes to rest it is no longer the same. It is irretrievably altered.

Back at Billy’s, Charter has taken up position in the shadows, the binoculars fixed to Asthma’s window. Dressed in a sheet, a peacock feather held to her temple with a barrette, she has enchanted herself and wheels around the tabletop like one possessed, setting up what appears to be a parade.

Vanderloon divides mankind into two constants: the ones who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible. Play, he writes, is a powerful form of magic — sometimes white, sometimes black. But always it is born of invention and intuition. Play is about becoming human, just as it is also about becoming a lion, a tugboat, a galloping stallion. The hallway that leads away from the child’s room and into the depths of the house is a river, a glacier, a bridge to the moon.

And now, the moment — and oh! it is prodigious! — leaps into wonderment; Asthma is making it snow. She is sowing fistfuls of silver confetti across the mirror lake, the woods, the park, the barbershop and Sphynx, the brass pyramid that — before it fell to the floor — was a cigarette lighter. Charter feels this snow touch his hands and face and knows the world is sacred. Space and time have dissolved, the window glass has dissolved. Charter and Asthma breathe the same air. Jenny beside them, using her scissors and glue.

He knows he will never get closer to life, that this moment is as close as he will get. The snow falls, star by star.

The smells of supper rise from the kitchen. Rich smells from a world light-years away. The radio is on and stupidly he thinks its sound travels at the speed of sound.