Fool on the Hill (30 page)

“Cordon’s not far enough back,” Hollister observed. “If it’s
any
kind of explosive . . .”

“Where’s the damn Bomb Squad?” Doubleday wanted to know.

“ ‘Scuse me.”

“Huh?”

They all turned; a sixth fellow had joined them. He wore the uniform of Cornell ROTC and had peach fuzz on his chin.

“I can do this guy for you,” the ROTC offered.

The Chief of Police narrowed his eyes. “What’s that?”

The ROTC fingered a pin on his uniform. “Rifle team. Get me a gun and I can do this guy. Ever see Robert DeNiro in
The Deer Hunter?
"

“Go home, bedwetter,” the Chief dismissed him. To the others he began: “Now I . . . hey! Hey, wait a minute!”

Someone had broken through the cordon. No, not broken through—George had simply
walked
through, while the Safety officers nearest him happened to be looking the wrong way. By the time they noticed him he was well into the circle and headed for the Doctoral Candidate.

“I’ll get him,” Doubleday said, fondling his nightstick.

“No,” ordered the Chief, feeling a sudden compulsion. “No, hold on. . .”

George kept walking, oddly confident, still feeling Calliope’s kiss. He no longer held the kite in front of him; he held it at his side, like a six-gun. Seeing the storyteller coming, the Doctoral Candidate broke off in mid-shout and turned to face him down.

“Howdy,” George said, feeling not the least foolish, somehow, as he adjusted his cowboy hat. “Where’re you from, stranger? Originally, I mean.”

The Doctoral Candidate flared his rain slicker and shook the tip of the lightning rod threateningly at George . . . but he did answer his question.

“Chicago,” he said. Piglet and Tigger watched from the wagon. “lllinois.”

The digital timer clicked over from
00:18:32
to
00:18:31.
And the Tower Clock began to chime.

High noon.

V.

Lion-Heart adjusted his opera glasses, watching the play with interest.

“What the hell are you up to, George?”

“Ten bucks says it’s interesting,” offered the Top.

“What’s your name?” George asked the Doctoral Candidate. The Candidate flared his rain slicker again.

“Christopher Robin,” he said.

George nodded, indicating the stuffed animals. “Where’s Pooh?”

“Pooh is home in bed,” Christopher Robin replied, beginning to sound impatient. “He has a social disease.”

“Sure he does. And what’s that thing you’re holding?”

The impatience backed off a bit. “It’s a lightning rod.” He shook the satchel. “I’m a
seller
of lightning rods.”

“Oh,
Je
-sus,”
cried the police psychologist. “He’s read Bradbury! I
hate
it when they’ve read Bradbury!” The Chief of Police gave him a look.

“So what’s your name?” Christopher Robin asked George jabbing the lightning rod at him. “Eh?”

George smiled in sudden inspiration. “What if I told you I was A. A. Milne? You being Christopher Robin, you’d have to do what I said. I’d have written you.”

“No, you didn’t write me.” Sounding disturbed at the prospect.

“Are you sure? Would you bet everything you had on it . . . Christopher?”

“I don’t like you,” Christopher Robin warned. “And you’re no cowboy, either.”

“True enough. Maybe you’re not Christopher Robin, either.”

“Hey, you watch it!” Angry, and also afraid. This time it was the remote control box he shook threateningly. “Don’t mess, I’m nuclear, buddy!”

“Of course,” said George. “And you’re going to make it rain, right.”

To himself he thought:
I am being glib, I am actually being glib with a potentially dangerous human being. And enjoying it. Maybe I’m as crazy as he is.

But he did not feel crazy, or afraid, what he felt was Calliope’s kiss, a lightness in his head, and a strong sense of control. Very much like the control he’d felt on the day of the box kites when he was a boy; not quite as strong a control as he had over a written story, but close, and getting closer.

Calliope, kissing him.

The timer, ticking over:
00:15:09.

Trouble. Fix it.

“Tell you what I am,” George continued. He had spied the House of Cards out the corner of his eye and his mind toyed with the possibilities of it. “What I am, Christopher, is a professional kite-flyer. Yes, it’s true. And if you don’t simmer down and start behaving right now, well, I’m just going to have to fly this kite of mine.”

“No.” A sliver of real panic.

“Yes.”

“You can’t.”

“Yes I can.”

“There’s no wind!” Jabbing, jabbing with the lightning rod. “You can’t fly a kite with no wind, that’s a rule!”

George looked sideways at the sky. Holding the kite in one hand and the spool of twine in the other, he turned in place. Once.

“The kite’ll fly,” he promised. “If you can make it rain, I can make the wind blow. Fair is fair.” He turned in place again.

“I hope someone’s videotaping this,” Lion-Heart said.

“Don’t you do it!” Christopher Robin’s thumb hovered over the red button on the box. “Don’t you
dare
fly that kite!”

“So what if he flies it?” Doubleday shook his head. “Can we please do something, Chief?”

And George turned in place a third time. “Put the box down,” he said.

“Oooooo, gonna make it rain, rain,
rain—
"

“Oh shit!” said Doubleday.

“Come on,” said George, and the wind did. It started as a whisper but immediately began to rise. One second, and the touch of the breeze caught the Doctoral Candidate’s breath in his throat, froze him with sudden fear, two seconds, stacks of undistributed Blue Zebra pamphlets began to scatter, three, the House of Cards shuddered, four, George’s cowboy hat tipped up, considered flying off, five, it did, six, the kite was straining against its string, seven, the wind was halfway to a gale.

“Magic!” Z.Z. Top shouted, laughing. “Fucking magic, George!”

“
RAIN!
”
Christopher Robin bellowed. His thumb descended on the button; George gave the House of Cards an encouraging glance.

A Card near the top bent under the wind force, causing the mock Trustee meeting to keel over. The cabbage head rolled free of its body, dropped four feet to where the
DIVEST NOW
!
banner snapped forward like a slingshot.

The cabbage flew, spinning, on a collision course.

It struck the Doctoral Candidate on the wrist.

The remote control box flew out of his hand, broke apart on the ground.

The timer continued to count,
00:13:59
to
00:13:58.

“No no no!” Christopher Robin cried, looking at the wreckage of his box. He felt a tug on his other hand; George had wrapped the kite string three full winds around the lightning rod and released it. The kite yanked it away, carried the metal rod up and over the top of the Campus Store, where it landed without injury among the Bohemians.

“Damn you!” said Christopher Robir, “You’re ruining it! You’re ruining my celebrity time!” He drew another lightning rod from the satchel, this one sharp at the end and bearing an uncomfortable similarity to a shish kebab skewer. “Ruining it!”

“Hey,” George said, and a gigantic Ace of Spades slapped the Doctoral Candidate in the head. He regained his balance and went for George with murder in his eye. But now the banner hit him, wrapped around his face, blinding him, turning him. With a last cry of “Ruining it!” he thrust forward with the lightning rod and impaled not George, but the thing in the wagon.

“Oh shit!” Doubleday had time to say again inaudible beneath the wind, but there was no explosion, only the puncturing of radiation stickers and the crumbling of papier-mâché. The lightning rod went in with silken smoothness, and as the top poked out the far side it dislodged the digital timer. Attached to nothing except itself, the timer tumbled to the ground, knocking itself silly.
OH:PO:OH
, it began flashing steadily.

The wind slacked off as Christopher Robin slid to the ground, bawling, “Ruined it,” he sobbed. “Ruined it.” The holes in his invention bled what appeared to be little amber beads; Piglet and Tigger were being buried.

Jelly beans
,
George thought, as three Safety officers pounced on Christopher Robin.
No danger after all, just jelly beans.
He tasted one. Hunny.

The Bohemians were on their feet and cheering; Z.Z. Top and Woodstock wrestled for possession of the lightning rod. The police, in particular the Chief, were eyeing George as if they wanted to arrest him or at least talk to him, but were afraid to try. Somewhere close a black-and-white mongrel dog was barking ecstatically. Everyone else, from the Blue Zebras to the police psychologist, looked as if someone had struck them over the head with a large board. Loaves and fishes would not have astounded them more.

“Well,” George said, feeling tired. He rescued Piglet from the jelly
beans, then took Tigger too; no one interfered with him. Giving Christopher Robin a parting nod he turned and gazed back up the slope to where he had left Calliope. Among all the people he could not spot her.

“No problem.” He felt a little tickle of fear but that was all. He still had her reassurance, after all.

You can be sure I wouldn’t leave without it even if I were planning to sneak out on you
. . .

Still searching for her, he reached up to his throat to touch the silver whistle she had given him.

His hand closed on empty air.

CALLIOPE EXITS

She did not even go back to the house to collect her things. Her duffel bag lay packed and ready at the foot of Ezra Cornell’s statue. The wind screamed as she slung the bag over her shoulder, but it did not touch so much as a single hair on her head.

“Poor George,” she whispered, crossing the Quad. “Poor George.”

By now he had discovered her disappearance; the Hurt was beginning. As always she felt a certain regret at this, hut causing the Hurt was after all a large part of her Purpose. A long (but not infinite) string of broken hearts stretched out behind her, a similar (probably not infinite) string waited just ahead, that was the road on which she traveled, and her name was Lady Calliope.

One more thing to be done before she resigned this town to memory. Moving rapidly under a darkening sky, she passed through North Campus and up Fraternity Row, coming in no time to the fortress-like Tolkien House. She did not wish to be seen and was not; none of the brothers were in sight of the front entrance as the Lady swept in, doors swinging open before her.

She entered the ,Michel Delving .Mathom-Hole, the great hall in which the House artifacts were stored. Neat rows of glass cases, each containing a weapon or some other item, all taken from Tolkien’s
Rings
trilogy. All but one. The odd-man-out was dead center in the hall, its case seamless and unlabeled.

It was a spearhead, some ten inches long and six wide, with a square socket for a shaft at its base. It had a long and mythic history, one that had never been chronicled by Tolkien or any other storyteller; for the past half century it had lain here, surrounded by a House that was itself drawn from myth.

Etched on the flat of the spearhead was a red-tinged cross, and beneath it the inscription:

FRACTOR DRACONIS.

The glass case sprang open at her touch. She grasped the spearhead incautiously; its edge defined sharpness, but it could not cut her unless she desired it to. She slipped it into the folds of her cloak and left the hall.

Down a corridor and into the obsidian elevator; she descended to the cellars. Not bothering to light a lamp, she made a beeline toward Lothlórien. Upon reaching the chasm she allowed herself a frivolity; breathing into her whistle, she scorned the stone bridge and treaded thin air across the gulf.

Through the stone doors, into the deserted Garden. A jeweled night sky glittered prettily above, but she headed for the part of the Garden where the trees grew thick and the sky could not be seen. Here she paused briefly to regard the Rubbermaid, which bided time beneath the branches of a dark oak.

“Soon,” Calliope told the mannequin. “Soon.”

She walked on, trees growing thicker and thicker, till all at once reality buckled. The trees thinned out again dramatically and she was no longer in the Garden at all but outside, halfway down The Hill, in The Boneyard. A few short yards ahead of her a plain white marble square lay flat against the ground, carved with a single word:

PANDORA

Selecting another oak tree, she brought out
FRACTOR DRACONIS
and threw it with a flick of her wrist, burying all but an inch of it in the wood. There it would remain until being drawn forth on the eve of the Ides of March.

The wind had died down a good deal. Snowflakes were falling now from a sky of leaden grey, but Calliope ignored them. For only a moment more she paused, looking up at the crest of The Hill, giving a final thought to the Fool whose real trial had not even begun.

“Best of luck, George,” she said, and blew town.

GEORGE IN HELL

I.

“No, no,
no!
"

George made his way through a yie ding crowd, the wind easing off, easing off. Luther ran up to him barking and leaping on his leg; at first George ignored him.

How could she have retrieved the whistle
from him?
But no, that was a foolish question even for a fool. The real question was, could he still catch up with her? He did not think he could convince her to stay, if she had decided time had come round to leave, but maybe, if he could only catch her, he could still manage some sort of decent good-bye.

Thinking this, George ceased ignoring the dog and sought to enlist its aid. “I need to track somebody,” he explained to it. “A woman. A beautiful woman. She was up there by the Tower just a few moments ago. Do you understand?”

Luther did not, as a matter of fact, understand at all, though he realized through empathy that George wanted something from him, wanted it rather desperately. Literally overwhelmed by the miracle of the wind-summoning, Luther was all too willing to please, but uncertain what was required of him. He saw George gesturing urgently in the direction of the Clock Tower and concluded that the man wanted him to go hat way.

“Good boy!” George cried, as the dog took off at a run. He did not know as he followed that the tracking job was an impossible task, for as with most other things, leaving a scent was optional with Calliope. In fact at that moment the last traces of her presence were being erased: back at the house the bed regained some of its springiness, forgetting the extra weight of the past few months; the bathroom mirror lost all memory of the Lady’s perfect image; no longer did the walls and ceilings recall the echo of her laughter, nor the floors the tread of her delicate feet. Her entire stay was, in sum, Removed.

Wholly unaware of this, George chased the dog up to the spot where
Calliope had last stood—receiving more scattered applause and awed looks until he had got some distance from the Straight—and Luther, glancing back and seeing the hopeful determination on the man’s face, kept running on a more or less random course. For nearly half an hour they raced about in this way—it began to snow around the fifteen-minute mark—until somewhere in the vicinity of the Veterinary College Luther stumbled across, of all things, an abandoned soup bone, which he affectionately presented to George.

“
WHAT!?”
the storyteller cried, realizing his folly. “You brought me to a
bone?
You think I’m
hungry?
"

Luther was hurt by the venom of this reaction, but his distress could not match the Hurt that swelled in George. The enormity of his loss struck him like a hammer blow, driving him first to his knees and then flat out against the cold earth. Still not understanding but wanting to help, Luther came forward to lick George’s ear, which did nothing at all to ease the pounding of blood in the storyteller’s temples.

When my job is done I’ll leave, without warning, and then you’ll want to die .
. .

That was just right; that was exactly right. In this weakest of moments George broke his own rule and despaired, though as Calliope had also foretold, he was not going to be allowed to surrender.

He went back to his house—yelling at the dog when it tried to follow him—and broke a large amount of furniture. This was no random act of destruction; George could sense Calliope’s Absence, and punished the chairs, tables, and other furnishings as conspirators. He took a special lingering delight in trashing the mirror in the bathroom, but did not touch the bed, surmising that he would have enough trouble trying to sleep tonight without tearing up the mattress.

When there was more debris than he could stand he went out again, neglecting to take a coat although an inch of snow now lay on the ground and more was coming down every minute. In a well of self-pity he descended The Hill to The Ithaca Commons, thinking he would never recover from this.

Yet George’s despair did not remain pure for very long. Even in Hell, common sense and optimism sometimes find a voice. As he entered The Commons he saw that the outdoor clock/thermometer read 25°, and a small rational segment of his addled brain spoke up.
Not wise to be out in this wearing just a shirt
,
it said.
All chest-beating aside, you don’t really want to die, do you?
The rest of his brain ignored the question, but he had barely gone ten yards when his body was racked with chills—Aha! You
can
feel physical discomfort—that nearly doubled him over.

A poor man who happened to be gazing wistfully through a store window took note of George’s plight and went to help him. The poor man had on three overcoats one atop the other, all ragged, and he offered the outermost coat to George. The storyteller thought to run away at first, not wanting this act of kindness which infringed on his sense of abandonment,
but the shivers were so bad he could barely stand up straight, much less run. Before he knew what was happening the poor man had draped the coat over his shoulders, saying: “There, there you go. Merry Christmas early, OK?”

The coat stank but it was warm, and at the feel of that warmth George’s hands betrayed him. He reached into his pockets, taking out all his money—better than three hundred dollars—and giving it to the poor man in a crumpled ball. His lips betrayed him, too. “Merry Christmas early,” they said.

The poor man’s face lit up like a sunburst, much to George’s chagrin.

“Oh Jesus,” he said, counting the bills. “Oh Jesus, are you
sure?
"

“I’m sure,” George muttered. Finding he had strength to move, he did so.

“Hey!” the poor man called after him. “Hey, can I at least buy you a beer

or something?”

“No thanks!” George called back, desperate to escape.

“Well hey, you take care, OK? Can’t thank you enough for this . . . Merry Christmas!”

The last thing George heard him say was “Holy shit, Oral Roberts was right,” and then he rounded a corner and was free. But the poor man’s generosity had done its damage—try as he might, George could not return to his state of despair. Instead he paused by a plate glass window and was berated by his own reflection.

“You ass,” his reflection said. “What do you think you’re doing out here in the snow? Go home, have some tea. Break a few more things if you can’t help yourself. But cut the crap; frozen you’ll look even dumber than Romeo did.”

His sense of self-preservation restored, George could not ignore this advice. He remained more depressed than he had ever been in his life, but with a reluctant surge of optimism he began to suspect that he might learn to cope, after all.

Drawing the ratty, smelly coat tightly around himself, he headed back up The Hill to his house.

By way of The Boneyard.

II.

It was to see the stone that he went that way, the stone hand-hewn in memory of an infant child who had entered and left the world on the same day.

HERE LIES ALMA RENAT JESSOP

BORN APRIL 23, 1887

DIED APRIL 23, 1887

HER FATHER LOVED HER

What possessed him to come stand in ankle-deep snow and stare at this rock he could not say, not at first. Certainly Alma Jessop’s father must have suffered a great deal of pain, but it was not really analogous to George’s torment; one did not mourn a dead child and grieve over the loss of a lover in the same way. Although both might lead one down the path of despair. . . .

April, she had died. April could still be a very cold month in Ithaca, though it was certainly not the best month for dying of exposure. A depressed person would have a better bet walking along the edge of one of the gorges and “accidentally” falling in. Of course the man Jessop had done neither; hand-making his daughter’s tombstone had probably kept him too occupied to even consider suicide.

Yes.
That was it; that was the key. An act of creation in the face of loss. George was no carver of tombstones, but he could channel the Hurt into a story. Yes, how simple: A story about the perfect woman . . . and the Fool who fell in love with her. He could start writing as soon as he got home; like the bed, he had been careful not to harm his typewriter during the furniture-smashing rampage. Now it no longer mattered if he could not sleep tonight; he would write until plain exhaustion took him.

Heart aching but excited as well now, he turned from Alma Renat Jessop with new purpose. A book, another book, that was it: to ease the Hurt.

He meant to go straight home now, but his feet led him to the far north end of The Boneyard by force of habit. So preoccupied was he with thoughts of this Calliope-novel that he did not notice he was going the wrong way until he had gotten there, to a place where all the tombstones sagged or leaned away from a central point, like the petals of a grey flower.

“Ah, Pandora!” he exclaimed, after a moment’s disorientation. He called himself a dunce and a few other things, though now that he was here he could not resist taking a look at the stone. He bent down and brushed aside the snow where he thought it should be, but uncovered only bare earth. He straightened up, took a step back, and his foot found the stone, skidding on the surface of the slippery marble square. George’s balance went right out from under him, and after some half-hearted pinwheeling of his arms he fell over backwards.

Typical,
he thought on the way down. Then his head struck the side of one of the sagging tombstones and he blacked out, his coat hanging open in front, snow continuing to fall on his prone form like ash.

Uncovered, the white marble square flashed its single word at the sky:

PANDORA

Beneath the frozen earth, something chuckled.