Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

At each stop, they endeavored to give food and alms to the poor, and Tull always imagined to espy the face of the girl called Amaryllis, and wondered why the feeling of her had stayed with him so long.

Their last destination fittingly brought them to one of the navels of the world, where Tull underwent a great trial.

About fifteen years earlier, NASA had been kind enough to provide Easter Island with an emergency shuttle landing strip — more than commodious for the trusty 737. At descent, the children gathered excitedly by the windows to view the stone moai, which, poised upon ahu altar shelves, looked more like Polynesian-themed salt and pepper shakers than icons of mysterium. Everything smelled of sea and horses when they deplaned, and it seemed the entire town and not a few travelers had appeared to observe the peculiar invaders, of which Edward and his AirBuggy — a Sun King and his golden chariot — were the prime attraction. They took over the four-star Hanga Roa as planned.

That very day, our constituents visited the crater that provided tuff, the dense volcanic stone of the famous stoic statuary (the right tuff indeed), and it was agreed that Rano Raraku was most certainly a quarry to give the normally unflappable Grandpa Lou meditative pause. Edward was amazed and delighted to find the place littered with hundreds of discarded, unfinished moai, some without eyes, ears, mouths or arms. Lucy pronounced it all “ Très Olde CityWalk — Workshop of the Gods!” Boulder was bored and had to be sweet-talked by Tull, which Lucy liked not a bit, into tagging along to the lapidarian caves of Orongo, anticlimactic site of the ancient Bird Man cult. (The young star’s spirits sagged then rose again with Edward’s allowance of a call to her theatrical agent via his Thrane & Thrane TT-3060A satphone.) Mr. Hookstratten said they used to pick clan chiefs by having warriors swim to the rock that jutted a mile offshore; the first to come back with a tern’s egg strapped to his forehead became Boss Man until nesting season. It was immediately proposed that a new Four Winds principal should thus be selected, and much urging of Mr. Hookstratten to hit the drink followed. He refused. When it looked as if Slouching Tiger and the chess-master-cum-alpinist might dive for competing honors, the children lost interest and began whining for supper.

It was a good thing the Boeing was well stocked, because all the island could offer were pastries, bananas, grocery-store meats and the ubiquitous pollo con agregado. Mutiny nearly ensued when the taciturn chefs proceeded to whip up bisque de homard and tournedos Rossini, along with braised Swiss chard, bone marrow and cardoons and what looked to be an obscene quantity of squid garnished with whorled, warty celeriac. The brave Mr. Hookstratten (one could almost see egg of tern on his brow), backed by troupes of loyal students and faculty, protested they’d all had enough and would like hamburgers and hot dogs instead. A heretofore timid, rubicund sommelier stepped forward to testily note how “the goose foie gras is from Ducasse family flocks in the Landes!”—a response which made the protesters think the cooks had lost their minds. Even Reed was discomfitted. With the latter’s help (and this endeared him to the students, at least for the night), Mr. Hookstratten staged an intervention involving female staff. The women promptly got stoned. In short order, the cooks were lured to tents deliberately pitched in the shadows of what the medievalist deemed “fertility moai” and over the course of a few otherworldly hours, six bottles of blended L’Esprit de Courvoisier were consumed, along with Laura Scudder’s ridged chips, Southern-fried chicken and a pot-brownie baker’s dozen.

Around midnight, Tull fell into sweat-soaked sleep. A rapping at the door of his room slowly brought him to awareness. When he answered, the bully whom Lucy had once stood up to on Tull’s behalf appeared at the door with a half-platoon of pint-size soldiers behind him. They bade him throw on some clothes, which he did in a fugue state before following them to the towering head that overlooked the cooks’ bacchanal with a kind of remonstrating hauteur.

They crept up a grassy slope and peered downward at this tableau: most of the adults had disbanded, while a few still spoke softly from within the same candlelit tent that only a week ago had been pitched over South African soil. The detritus of plates, dishware, foodstuffs and empty bottles was all around. A body — perhaps it was Slouching Tiger’s, perhaps one of the pilots’, perhaps Professor Hookstratten’s — lay fifty paces from the ahu, snoring vigorously. Attention was elsewhere drawn, though a wobbly Tull did not immediately join his scampering guides. What did comfort him was the sight of Lucy squatting nearby like a bushgirl and watching along with everyone else while a couple, half dressed, were “doing it.” It scarcely mattered who they were — steward or nurse, maven or techie — it was what they did that entranced. Tull slunk to his cousin, who acknowledged him with a glance before turning back to the dark, primitive spectacle. The woman moaned and seemed, like a crab, to scuttle away. She muttered a few words in low, anguished tones, which slowly grew louder until the phrase “fuck it” was vaguely discernible; a phrase repeated in varying stages of dishabille (“it” became “me” and “me” became “you” and “you” became “me” again — and so forth). At a certain point, her demands grew so furied that those in the tent grew silent, then burst into a hail of guttural laughter before going back about their sociable business.

Perhaps it was the pork pâté or boudin noir, or maybe the blood sausage too hastily combined with six frozen mini — Milky Ways — but the world began to spin and Tull along with it. His cousin helped him return to his hotel room, a phantasmagoric journey the boy hoped never again to be forced to repeat. Luckily, the teetotaling Dr. Raff had long since turned in; Lucy summoned him; after the required palpations, acute gastroenteritis was diagnosed. Nothing was to be done. Tull emptied bowels and stomach of all they had while Lucille Rose — martyr, author, girl detective — laid on cold compresses as he lurched through the maze of his delirium. Pullman was there, and he was glad about that. They stood before the puzzle his mother had designed at Saint-Cloud and which Mr. Randoll Coate (who in his dream bore Reed’s supercilious countenance) now perfunctorily dismissed. His nasty thumbnail critique amused Mr. Hookstratten and the cousins, leaving Tull hurt and betrayed. Stung by the remarks, he suddenly noticed his mother fleeing into one of the pathways. Everyone disappeared. The boy knelt to examine Pullman, who was festooned with strange open sores, and was glad they didn’t seem to be causing the beast any pain. He sprinted down the dark lane toward Trinnie. Instead of reaching the heart of the labyrinth, he found himself in an open clearing — that of La Colonne Détruite. There, his grandfather, as if orchestrating the arrangement of stones in a cemetery, directed deformed workers while they raised up more cracked columns, ragged drapes flapping like crows in the frame of each eyeless window-socket. He heard his mother call out, and ran toward one of the mysterious buildings. Inside, the furnishings were uncovered. The Dane clambered up the spiral stairs, slipping on marble as Tull overtook him. The boy reached the topmost bedroom and tentatively entered. The bathroom light was on …

“Dad?” Tull bolted upright. “Daddy!” he shouted, blinking sweat from his eyes.

Lucy rushed over to minister; she felt as if they were onstage in that part of a play where the invalid’s fever breaks.

Seeing it was she, he became embarrassed. “I … I was dreaming of my father,” he stammered, almost politely.