Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

“That’s terrible,” Guy said. “You were under twelve. They should have let you on.”

“It’s a national monument,” Tansy said, reprovingly.

“So is my wife,” said Conrad.

“I’m thinner now,” said Abigail, “than I was then.”

I was startled to realize that this was true. She wasn’t even plump anymore, really. Not thin, but this only because her skin hadn’t tightened up. She looked drained, depleted, and small. I am taller than my twin by a good inch, but until this night had never been able, literally, to look down on her. She had been larger than life. But no more.

“This brings us,” said Guy, “to the surprise. They’re letting us turn it on. Just for a few minutes.”

“What’s the point?” I asked. “We still can’t ride it. We’re not—”

“We can if we choose to,” Guy said. “I’ve been assured that a couple of minutes won’t damage anything.”

“Since when,” asked Conrad, who looked terrifically annoyed, “have you given a shit about Americana, you Bicentennial-hating, frog-fucking snob? This isn’t your speed, and it sure as hell isn’t mine. I’m going to bed.”

“And I am getting on one of these horses,” said Abigail.

Conrad laughed an ugly laugh. “Well, I’ll stick around for that. Tomorrow the Chamber of Commerce is going to get the big surprise.”

“You’ll just have to bear with me on this,” said Guy. “It has to do with a work in progress.”

“My wife?”

“In a way. The work in progress is my first novel, and your wife is its inspiration.”

“You’re writing a novel ?” This really was a nasty shock to me. “You hate fiction.” Guy had this thing about what he called, with venomous contempt, “mere psychological realism.” He often bragged that he hadn’t read a single novel since Nightwood .

“Hilda thinks it’s time.”

“Why?” What a pompous poop. “Jesus, Guy, why not build a suspension bridge? Write a symphony? You know as much about—”

“You’re writing a novel about my wife? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“How do you turn this thing on?” Abigail gazed raptly at a white horse with a worn leather saddle. Its neck and head were extended, so that it could crane its gaze upward at the sun. “I remember this one,” she said. “It had its own name.”

“They all do,” said Tansy. “Look at the bridle. See, there’s a gold nameplate.”

“Fayton,” Abigail read. “It’s the same identical horse.”

Meanwhile Conrad was beating up, verbally, on Guy, doing his Dominant Male routine, but it didn’t have its usual effect. Guy stood up to him by ignoring him. He seemed centered, as Tansy would say, and his eyes remained upon my sister. No, Guy said, mildly, he wasn’t interested in Abigail’s life story, which Conrad colorfully assured him was a matter of public record anyway. He wasn’t interested in “achieving a fictional replica.”

“Mere psychological realism,” I said. “Heaven forefend. The thing that kills me about you guys, you postmodernist hoo-hah pooh-bahs, is how little respect you have for character. You carry on as though the human personality were some trivial thing, and it’s not, it’s not, it’s everything. It’s the great mystery.” I had Guy’s attention. He regarded me with respect, which was thrilling in a way, because I was suddenly sober, energized, speaking up for Readers Everywhere. “Your character. Mine. What does it amount to? It’s real, but we can’t know it. We can make predictions about our own behavior based on what we’ve done in the past, and how we feel about it now, and what niggling horrors we come awake to at three o’clock in the morning, but they’re only predictions.

“We don’t even know if we’re good, until it’s all over, and then it’s too late. We can be decent all our whole lives, and then at the last minute we can do some inexplicable unforgivable thing.”

“You always get back to morality, Dorcas,” said Guy. “We can all count on that . You’re predictable. So am I. We’re clockwork things.”

“Not true!”

“And who,” asked Tansy, “is winding the clock?”

“Tansy,” I said, “could we try, just this once, not to let this debate turn into a cliché festival?”

I heard a metallic clunk and turned to see my sister astride her dream steed. Her feet barely cleared the ground, and the entire structure listed slightly to her side. She was holding fast to the gold-painted pole, her head thrown back, staring upward in the manner of Fayton, the carousel horse with the irritating, nonsensical name.

“Somebody,” piped up Tim, “has to balance it. We need someone on the opposite horse.”

“If you’re going to make people up,” I said, “which is what fiction writers do, Guy, storytellers, they create fictional human beings, then you have an impossible, holy task. You have to create characters as complex and unknowable as real people. The fact that you can’t do that, that you can’t even come close, is the very reason you should try. If you’re not going to bother, then stick with your poetry.”

“I can never realize what you people talk about,” said Pilar.

“Dorcas,” said Guy, “would you mind getting on the other horse?”

“Get on Pegasus, Dorcas,” Tansy said.

“I’m talking here,” I said. “I’m making a point. Excuse me. Would somebody please for one goddamn second pay attention—”

“Get on Pegasus,” said Abigail.

“I heard you,” said Guy. “I respect you. Now, please pay me the same respect. I’m looking,” he said, reasonably, “for my central image.”

“Well who the pluperfect fuck isn’t,” said Conrad.

I was crying when I got on the horse. Not out loud, but I don’t think I bothered to hide my tears. When had I become such a baby? I saw Abigail and her horse rise up, so that we dangled an equal, short distance above the dirt. My horse was a palomino or something. I don’t remember the details. Pegasus was Perseus’s horse. He sprang from the spilled blood of Medusa. “Abigail,” I called to her. “Spell the name of your horse.”

“P-h-a-e-t-o-n. Fayton.”

“Conrad,” ordered Guy, “turn that key back there.”

And Conrad did as he was told.

At first we flew in silence at a sedate speed, heads tilting slightly inward, and I could see faces as I passed, Guy gleaming like Buddha, Tim smiling like a kid, Conrad scowling furiously. Why, I wondered, are you so angry? I shouldn’t have gotten on Pegasus. It was bad enough that Conrad couldn’t intimidate Guy. The ver de terre had indeed revolvé ed, at least for this one night. On top of this I was somehow betraying him, and I found that this mattered to me. Where did my loyalties lie? Where indeed.

Phaeton, desirous of his father’s glory, drove the sun chariot to ground, perishing in spectacular excess of ambition. The night wind, as we gathered speed, froze my eyes, the faces blurred, my tears dried, my ecstatic sister’s hair streamed out long and straight behind her upturned head, and the carousel calliope came to life, sharp enough to wake the whole town. “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” We flew faster, parallel to the ground it seemed, our heads close together, our feet outflung and dangerous. The rickety rumbling thing was going to break, we would careen out through picture windows into people’s living rooms, we were raising a ruckus, we were out of control. I wonder if she ever tells him of me. We were objectified, observed, fiddled with, entertained, like juggler’s balls, in the mind of the only postwar poet certain to survive the millennium. We were a central image, Apollo and Dionysus, churning into butter, and that was my last cogent thought, if you can call it that, before I was cut off from my world by pure sensation, and I had no thoughts at all, and what a vast and lonely place that was. No signposts, no template, no limits. I was in my sister’s universe. How could she stand it here? How could anybody stand it here?