The Metaphysical Ukulele (4 page)

The Song at the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole

The Five of Swords continues to haunt Patricia Geary. He shows up daily. She sits at her kitchen table with its view of bougainvillea creeping along a shadowbox fence. Hummingbirds suck from the pink flowers. Pat pushes aside wayward student manuscripts and the crusty oatmeal bowl that her husband neglected to remainder in the sink. She lays down three cards. The Five of Swords emerges as one. He is a warning or a reminder of ego struggles and pyrrhic victories. Every morning.

He's a mysterious character this number Five, standing alone with two swords stacked in his arms and three swords scattered about his feet. Two vanquished fighters wander away.

Of course, Pat knows how to read the card. She knows what it means and how to apply it to her life, but it's the artwork on this particular deck that sends her down a rabbit hole.

The victor who has gathered the swords looks off. Presumably, he'd be a warrior. Who but a warrior would want five swords? But this victor looks more artist than warrior. His shirt is tattered, frayed at the edges, falling apart not
with the slashes of enemy swords or the outstretched fabric of a tussle, but threadbare from too many wearings, too many washings. There isn't a bloodstain to be found on the blouse. Even if there were, Pat is certain she'd read it as red acrylic paint. Or maybe catsup.

And the victor's countenance in three-quarter profile, facing the edge of the card while his round, soft eyes glance back at the vanquished: he has the beautiful and innocent façade of a seducer, of a man who tenderly fills his wife's pipe with opium. Pat knows that face. It originally belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Regardless what the card means, Rossetti's face is the real ghost, the real haunting.

At moments like this, Pat seeks solace in her ukulele.

Times haven't called for this consolation in so long that she isn't sure exactly where she can find the ukulele. Somewhere in her home office. Somewhere buried deep in the geologic layers, in a strata she dates as 1987. The excavation will take the better part of an afternoon. Just the barrier of dolls, stacked like Day-Glo cannonballs and keeping vigil with their huge eyes, will take a few hours of gentle movement.

With brown paper bags from Trader Joe's substituting for a fossil hammer, Pat begins digging.

Many hours later, around midnight, Pat sits in her office chair and scans the room. Heaped in brown grocery bags are the archives of a writer's life, which, so far, seems to have been dedicated to the accumulation of worldly goods.

Pat knows what the average mystic has to say about worldly goods: clutter is evil; simplicity is good. But somewhere inside her Pat wonders if this dichotomy itself isn't a little too much simplicity.

Regardless, the brown paper bags sit full of snapshots of loved ones, school pennants, stories written by aspiring undergraduates, and a variety of once-meaningful effluvia: a first-place certificate, neatly folded, along with the blue ribbon, for the Vista Junior Talent Contest; a yarn voodoo doll; a turtle-shaped pincushion; a ballerina jewelry box; a Ginny doll missing half a leg; imitations of reproduction Blythe dolls; a toy poodle with its fur darkened from the oil and dirt of a younger Pat's fingers; a mysterious piece of brick with the single letter P; old issues of
Marie Claire
and
Vogue
; entire series of mystery novels dedicated to knitting, antiquing, and psychics; acrylic yarn in colors that went out of style a decade ago; single knitting needles missing their partner. Bag after bag after bag.

Atop the bag nearest her, Pat glimpses again a letter from the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the overseers of the Philip K. Dick Award, inviting her to Norwescon in lovely Tacoma, Washington for the award ceremony. Pat and four other finalists would read from their work. One finalist would win. Pat, of course, won. That was a Five of Swords memory.

Unlike most people, Pat was absent when her life changed irrevocably. The gears that would control the machinations
of her future turned in Manhattan while Pat vacationed in Lake City, Florida. It was the holiday season, 1986.

Pat took a stroll through the woods near her mother's home. She wore a cape—always a risky fashion choice. The key, Pat knew, was to wear the cape rather than letting the cape wear you. Superheroes: they let the cape wear them. The cape wore Superman so strongly it carried him into the air, forcing him into a perpetual plank pose. Batman tried to use his cape to tuck his love for a Boy Wonder under while Robin's love for Batman was broadcast in the fluttering red cloth flowing behind him. Pat draped her cape over her shoulders, keeping her warm on a cool Florida morning. Confidence was key. Pat pulled it off while roaming across campus in Baton Rouge, but here in Florida, with her sister picking at every random hair on Pat's skin, the cape was a more nebulous proposition.

It followed Pat into the woods.

The conifers of Northern Florida stretched, long and lean, into the gray sky. A young boy scaled the thin trunk of a nearby pine. Pat sat to watch his progress. He shuttled up the tree with a competence familiar to all primates but the human kind. The tree buckled under the boy's weight. It bowed, impossibly, to the ground. For a tense second, Pat watched as the tree formed a pine archway and set the boy down on the carpet of needles at the forest floor. The boy climbed off. The tree whipped back into place.

Snap!

The boy raced off for another tree. Before he would've
had time to climb it, Pat heard another snap. A cursory inspection of the forest unearthed a group of boys, all climbing the thin, flexible pines until the trees touched their tops to the forest floor. Pat settled in for the spectacle.

Through the fog of the waxing day, another figure walked toward Pat. Pat drank him in. Where had he found this gorgeous ensemble? His indigo tuxedo contrasted smartly with a billowing white silk shirt and charcoal brocade jodhpurs. Neat gray suede boots peeked out from beneath the cuffs and long, slender fingers were covered with lambskin gloves.

Pat had never met this gentleman in a nonfictional world, but she knew him.

Sammy.

Sammy sat next to Pat. Pat shivered, though the cool Florida woods were not cold enough to elicit a shiver, though her cape wrapped around to keep her snug. She had the impulse to be nice, to set this conversation on friendly terms despite Sammy's ominous aura. She said, “I like your suit.”

The statement dropped like a nickel falling on a hardwood desk, rattling in its understatement.

“There are laws,” Sammy said.

Pat felt something like a shot put drop to the bottom of her stomach.

The group of boys continued to climb on and climb off the pines. Snaps echoed throughout the woods. Pine tops wobbled.

“There are laws for everything. Thieving, for instance.”
He leaned closer, his ice-chip eyes glittering in the faint traces of morning sun.

“My book.” The words came out before Pat considered them. She wasn't sure which book she referred to. A few years earlier, her novel
Living in Ether
had come out. Perhaps she'd leaned a bit too much on the works of Yukio Mishima, but that was an influence, not a theft. And what about
Strange Toys
, sitting on a desk at Bantam in Manhattan. Too much Angela Carter? Too much Lewis Carroll? Could a writer steal one novel from two people?

Who was the real thief here, and what were they stealing?

Sammy said, “Writers steal things. Writers don't know what to do with them.”

“Who are you?” Pat asked.

“You know my name,” Sammy said. “And I have something you need.”

“Me?”

“There is danger ahead for your novel. But there is always a way around every law. Each law with the penalty attached, each system connected to another system. Because you have something I want, I'm prepared to…”

One of the tree-climbers ran toward Pat and Sammy, not as if he were running to them, but as if they didn't exist, and he could run through the space occupied by them. The boy paused and met Pat's glance.

Pat knew what the boy saw, what everyone saw looking into Pat's face: that expression yearning toward some other world. That expression which seemed to piss people
off and make them suspicious. The boy was no exception. He snarled at Pat. His twisted lips stretched the freckles on his face. His blond crew-cut glistened with dew slicked onto him from the pines he climbed. At that moment, he looked like every cocky boy who pursued Pat in high school and turned his failure to capture Pat into a hatred for her.

The boy said, “Nice cape, lady.”

More than anything, Pat was surprised that Sammy, with his indigo tux and jodhpurs, got a free pass while Pat's cape was the object of backwoods scorn. She turned to see Sammy's reaction, but Sammy was gone.

The boy, too, scurried off for another flexible pine.

Pat gathered herself to return to her mother's. She stood and brushed the needles off her slacks. Tracing the path of a pine needle on its way to the forest floor, Pat saw at her feet a ukulele. The instrument either came from Sammy or came from nowhere. Pat was half-convinced that Sammy had only been metaphysical. Thus, the ukulele would have to be metaphysical.

It sat on the carpet of pine needles, cute as a pug. Even the grains of dark wood reminded Pat of a pug's short hairs.

If the ukulele had had a tail, it would've wagged at Pat.

Pat reached down and rubbed the ukulele's neck. The ukulele jumped into her arms. She stroked the strings and heard the familiar tune: My Dog Has Fleas.

She started walking back to her mother's house, her cape fluttering in the wind and the ukulele trotting along
in step with her.

Somehow, she knew her novel was doomed.

The evening after Pat's stroll among the arching pines in the forests of North Florida, Sammy struck. Pat's writing career careened down the one-way path of entropy; she'd no more be able to recreate the past of it than she could turn a sapling back into an acorn or shrapnel back into a grenade.

The moment of the Five of Swords cut in Pat's absence. While she celebrated the growing Christmas season in Florida, her editor accepted that one drink too many at a holiday party in the Bantam offices.

In Pat's editor's defense, the waning 1986 was a troubling time for publishing. Federal laws had changed. Any media company with enough money could buy any other media company. Monopolies could form. The Germans had gotten into the game, buying, among other things, Bantam. Bantam was both Pat's publisher and Pat's editor's employer. Now, they were all owned by Bertlesmann, a company also known for being the largest publisher of Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich.

In the true top-down fashion that had characterized generations of Bertlesmann companies, Bantam hired a new executive to clean things up. He often slammed his fist against the table at editorial meetings. His arms flailed when he spoke passionately. His long bangs were known to come loose amidst marketing rants. Only after all his sweat and spit had been expunged would he comb the long bangs
back into a neat, pomaded center part.

The last of the renegade editors, the ones who remembered an age of publishing before it was consumed by cookbooks and celebrity memoirs and pulp, stood up to the executive. Pat's editor was among them. She brushed away his insistence on authors yielding a fifteen-percent profit margin with the same vigor she brushed the executive's hand off her skirt.

As the eggnog flowed in the Bantam offices, as faces turned pink and noses red, as simple office flirtations turned into complicated actions, the executive came to celebrate with the same vigor he used to rule the office. He danced too closely with secretaries. His hands sought purchase in lecherous gropes.

The happy executive was as troublesome as the tyrannical one.

One of the female editors upon whom the executive made passes lured him into a precarious place. This female editor was not Pat's editor. She was instead a young Columbia alumnus with ambitions as large as her shoulder pads.

She dangled mistletoe over her helmet of hair and winked in the specific direction of the executive. The executive bopped over to her in a dance that resembled a one-man conga line. The young editor channeled her laughs into a smile. She nodded toward a spacious closet. The executive danced inside alone. The young editor locked the door behind him.

The closet door muffled the executive's cries of
shenanigans.

Without him, the holiday party stepped into a new gear. Reverie abounded among streamers and cubicles. Someone slid Clarence Carter's “Backdoor Santa” into the cassette player of the boom-box. The song drowned out the executive's pounding on the closet door.

Everyone danced: some on the floor, some on desks, some on unread manuscripts, some on each other in the copy room.

Because Pat was not there, she could not verify Sammy's presence in that Bantam office. In her mind's eye, Sammy was there, dressed entirely in white, a white turban decorated with pentangles on his head and a large cigar in his mouth. He walked around the editorial offices in a funny, crook-backed way, alternately spewing rum, tossing handfuls of cornmeal into the radiators, and issuing clouds of cigar smoke. A woman in a full white skirt with many petticoats, a white ruffled overblouse, and many strings of glass beads, seeds, and seed pods danced behind Sammy. Her hair was tucked under a white bandanna covered with signs and symbols.

In time, the executive reduced his banging to three rhythmic bangs followed by a silence. Pat's editor screamed, “Everyone, pipe down!”

Someone turned off the boom-box. Dancing stopped.

Pat's editor listened to the beat of the executive's pounding. Bam. Bam. Bam. Silence. Bam. Bam. Bam. She filled in
the silence with song. It went something like this:

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Silver Bells.”

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Silver Bells.”

Bam. Bam. Bam.