Come, Thou Tortoise

  Up and down the aisle I go. Jiggling every armrest. No, no, no. First row, window seat. Left side. The armrest opens!

  Well, it opens after twenty minutes, with the help of a screwdriver.

  And lo and behold, a secret compartment. And it is not empty. No, it is not. Here is the other photograph, the one of my dad throwing up in the sick bag. And there are letters. Maybe fifty letters with a rubber band around them. I sit down. Fasten my seatbelt. Pull out the first letter.

  Wilfred Moss

  138 Welkin Way Road

  London W12 2RU

  United Kingdom

  Dear Mr. Moss,

  You understand why I might intercept a letter to my daughter from “The Plane.” What message are you referring to. No doubt you are well intentioned. I am sorry for your circumstances. What I infer are your circumstances. What are your circumstances. What an odd missive. Are you describing some form of hemihypertrophy.

  Forgive a protective father and please explain.

  Walter Flowers

  For a while I don’t move. Then I fold the letter and put it back in the armrest. Close the armrest. Undo my seatbelt. Put the screws back in. This is not my secret compartment.

  Come on, Audrey.

  Come on where.

  Get up. Go.

  COME, THOU TORTOISE

  Once again I am Shakespeare’s doorstop. Sorry, bookmark. While Chuck makes a tomato sandwich with all the remaining tomatoes from the thugs’ Christmas gift. Linda will not be pleased.

  My eyes close. My head droops. I have not recovered from my Christmas libations. I am thirsty as hell. My only thought is of my pool, inaccessible while I am on bookmark duty.

  Heads up, Winnifred, says Chuck and drops a piece of lettuce on the page.

  You are too kind, Mr. Stanch.

  Can a bead of moisture be extracted, I wonder, from such a pathetic, wilted piece of greenage. We shall see. I take a bite and drag the leaf towards me. As it moves down the page, it uncovers the following words:

  Come, thou tortoise!60

  Which words stop me mid-bite, I can tell you. Were they there before. How could I have missed them.

  I toss the lettuce to one side and point at myself. Me.

  Yes, you.

  Come where.

  I want to keep reading but I can get only so far before I risk falling off the book and possibly the table too.

  Fuck.

  I look hopefully at Chuck. Totally absorbed in dilapidating the tomato tree.

  I turn back to the words between my feet.

  Come, thou tortoise to the power of sixty!

  I am a pretty powerful tortoise. I walked across the desert once, about a century ago. All the way from Texas. Slow like the camel in Lawrence of Arabia. Talk about thirst. No Lemon Pie pools back then. All along the way I passed overturned tortoise shells, picked clean by birds. Pretty discouraging. But I kept going. Why. Because I had heard stories about trees a hundred feet tall. I had heard about rain. And why should a tortoise not have rain in her life. I was curious. I was youngish. I was adventurous.

  Come, thou tortoise!

  I can’t believe there’s a tortoise in Shakespeare. This changes everything.

  Anyway, I remember waking up on my fiftieth or so morning in the desert, having made imperceptible progress the day before, and thinking to myself, Oh God, will I ever see colour again. Because there was only brown for as far as the eye could see and the hot stretched blue of the sky, which does not count.

  I despaired. I would never see trees. I would never feel rain. Put me out of my misery. I shook a fist at the sky. I even tried to flip myself over. But just as I was heaving myself sideways, a red butterfly alighted on a rock in front of me.

  The wings beat slowly like a fan.

  Why, hello.

  I could have eaten that butterfly, it was so beautiful, so red. I stood very still (not hard to do) for a long time, drinking in its colour. What did those sunglassy eyes see. A brown tortoise. I felt ashamed of my blandness.

  I am ashamed of my blandness, I said.

  Me too, she said.

  I was astounded. What! But are you not aware of the art you carry on your back.

  What art.

  Well. That was an enlightening moment. Because if the butterfly could carry such art on her back and not know it, what might a tortoise carry on her back.

  Apparently art enough to inspire Shakespeare.

  A century later I made that same trip through the desert on the dashboard of a car. Which is definitely the way to go. Takes two days. Two leisurely days.

  The tomato plant has been dropping tomatoes. Sometimes they fall surprisingly far from the tree. And earlier, when Chuck was playing Prospero, a tomato fell really far from the tree. I mean, it heaved itself at Chuck. Which Shakespeare’s tortoise found very amusing indeed. She laughed and laughed. She finally got the joke of the tomato tree.

  Now Chuck is exacting his revenge on that tree by eating all the tomatoes in one sitting, even the green ones.

  He will make himself sick, the fool. What an Antonio he is today.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  Chuck pauses mid-bite. Wipes his hands on his bare chest. Which is gross. Opens the door.

  I’ve come for the tortoise, says a familiar voice.

  I look over my shoulder. Cliff!

  In the middle of London a white horse canters out of the fog and almost runs me over.

  That’s the horse path, miss.

  There’s a horse path!

  And not five minutes ago I was in the Starbucks quarter, asking for directions.

  London is all crowds and Starbucks and startling handbags. And a horse, cantering through the middle of it. The fog is white. If you get very close to that rose bush you can see some tired yellow roses. Very pale.

  Uncle Thoby once said I would love the tube. Boy was he wrong. The map, I love. At Heathrow I bought a map that opened like a flower with six petals. You could open one petal or two or all the petals. I loved what a cat’s cradle the underground was, on the map. I loved the word underground, as a noun. But I was not loving how packed it was. I could barely open one petal of my map.

  It was morning rush hour. What did I expect. I expected the claustrophobics to unite! I expected someone to acknowledge that this was a mighty tight squeeze. No one did. And just when I thought not one more person could possibly fit in here, there was absolutely no way, ten schoolgirls in grey uniforms piled in. Three stops later, nine schoolgirls got off. One girl was not going to school. One girl had other plans.

  This was my first impression of London.

  And that everyone looks at your bag, at what you are carrying, not at you.

  I burst with glee from the train and saw a sign that warned: 195 STEPS. It was either 195 steps or a lift so crowded that people were being slotted in horizontally near the ceiling. A no-brainer.

  When I got to the top of the steps, I had to sit down. A cop hovered. I expected him to say, No loitering with a carry-on bag that big. But he only offered me his hand. Upsy-daisy, he said. Now where are you trying to get to.

  I looked at my map. One of the petals was gone. The one with Toff’s house on it. Goddamn it. Did someone on the tube steal that part of London. I stopped at a kiosk and bought another. This one was fluted like a coffee filter. It began in a tight whorl shape and then exploded in your hands.

  I crossed a street without looking, because I was studying exploded London, and a car neighed at me. The horn was a neigh.

  I found Toff’s house in a mews. On a mews. I expected cats. I saw none. All the houses were white, like teeth. I checked the address. Then knocked. No answer. I knocked and rang the bell and knocked some more.

  I pounded my fists, briefly.

  Somewhere in London bells started ringing. Someone was taking big careless swipes at a bell.

  I sat down on Toff’s stoop. It was sunny at this stage. A horrible white sun that hurt my eyes.

  A woman wit
h wet hair stepped onto her stoop. She was on the phone. The word brilliant snapped down the mews. She noticed me and did not seem amused. She watched me while saying into the phone that she was not inviting what’s his name because he’d been trying to quit smoking for too long and was, frankly, more addicted to his stressed-out persona than to cigarettes. So you’ll bring the—brilliant. Yes, brilliant. Okay.

  She looked at me and it was like a staring contest, so I got up and walked.

  I walked along Oxford Street and saw all the startling handbags. I stopped at Starbucks where small equals tall. I found Hyde Park and the fog rolled in. I was run over by the white horse. At home the fog is grey, not white. This is like dry ice.

  There is a black clump in the fog that turns out to be Peter Pan with all his crew. I circle the statue, looking for the Newfoundland dog, because isn’t there a Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan. No dog. The statue would be better if there were a Newfoundland dog. And if it were in colour. The boy at the top looks bossy.

  Onward. There is a man-made river, more a rivulet, that if seen from above spells PRINCESS DIANA. There is a golden Prince Albert sitting on a throne. He is rumpled and reminds me of Judd.

  What am I looking for. The stable that horse hailed from.

  It begins to hail. Huge white golf balls of hail. Is this usual. I look up and one smacks me in the eye. Hard. Not the stye eye. The good eye. For a moment all I can see is white.

  I find a tree near the pale yellow roses with its branches bent like a birdcage. I crawl inside. The branches have no leaves. I sit on the ground near the trunk and keep my head down. Then I feel the ground shake. The white horse is galloping by, its nose tucked in against the weather. He and his rider are galloping home.

  The flight over was uneventful, except that I did see, I think, a piñata in the cockpit when I boarded the plane. I said to my neighbour in 34J, What is the last thing you would ever want to see in a cockpit.

  A terrorist, she said, struggling with her seatbelt.

  How about a piñata.

  She let the seatbelt go slack.

  Yeah, I said.

  The plane took off and felt like it was travelling west. Which of course it wasn’t. It was travelling east. But west is how it felt, and I couldn’t turn the plane around in my brain. I thought about how, when you are in audience formation, your brain wants you to be facing something. And so it invents a direction. That direction is arbitrary and has nothing to do with real geography.

  34J was reading a book: Don’t Fall Off the Mountain by—surprise, surprise—Shirley MacLaine. On the back cover Shirley was on a beach, as per usual, but the shot was taken from above, like maybe she already had fallen off the mountain but had landed on her feet. There was a quote from Shirley that said: “After two months on a picture my car seemed to veer toward the airport of its own accord.” I hear you, Shirley.

  34J was not turning the pages.

  You’re not an air marshal, are you.

  Sorry.

  Nevermind. Carry on. I tilted my chair back and watched an episode of Sherlock Holmes.

  I felt remarkably calm. Why. Because I had a mission. To bring Uncle Thoby and Wedge home. It was a matter of Sherlock-Holmesian step-by-stepness. It was a matter of exercising my deductive powers, however weak, to eliminate what is false until only what is true remains.

  Also, I had packed the red parachute.

  There were two scenarios that were fun to play out in my mind while everyone else on the plane napped.

  SCENARIO 1:

  I go to Cambridge and wait outside Humouse House in the early ante meridiem. Hopefully there is a Starbucks across the street. I wait for Lionel de Tigrel to turn up. When he does, I pounce on him. His lion’s ears twitch. The leapling, he curses. That’s right. You have something that belongs to me, n’est-ce pas. He tries to block my path, but I, abuzz with caffeine, leapfrog over him and directly into his lab. There I find a terrarium bathed in a shaft of golden light. Wedge! He stands up, ribcage rattling. Here I am, Audrey!

  SCENARIO 2:

  I go to Toff’s house and wait outside in the early ante meridiem. Hopefully there is a Starbucks across the street. When Toff exits his house, I pounce on him. His wolfish eyes flash. The leapling, he curses. That’s right. You have something that belongs to me, n’est-ce pas. He tries to block my path, but I, abuzz with caffeine, leapfrog over him into his house. There I find Uncle Thoby tied to a chair, bathed in a shaft of golden light. Uncle Thoby! I remove the gag. Oddly!

  There was nothing to see out the plane window until, after many hours, the pilot said, Ladies and gentlemen, we are flying over Belfast. It was still dark, though the horizon had a pink edge. Belfast was a sprinkle of lights. Belfast should be more than a sprinkle, I thought. But we were very high up.

  The pink edge widened and widened.

  My window shutter was an eyelid half-closed. Wake up, little eye. In the bright pink distance I saw other planes. So many I couldn’t count them. Okay, I could count them. Eleven. I counted eleven planes out my window. Was that normal.

  34J said, This is the busiest airspace in the world. Of course it is normal.

  Noli me tangere, all you other planes. They were circling. So were we. We were making what was probably a pretty pattern of interlocking circles. Just biding our time, waiting for our turn to land at Heathrow-up Airport.

  Planes from all over the world. As we taxied, I saw a real live Qantas plane. Which I took as a good omen. I saw Hemus Cutis Air. All Nippon Over Air. Click Air. Curly Air. Straight Air. I couldn’t help but feel a little excited. Despite the seriousness of my mission.

  I tightened my ponytail. I was on the ground. New ground.

  We arrived at our gate. I fidgeted in my seat and watched the baggage handlers. They were all symmetrical.

  When I wake under the tree, the fog has lifted. The sun is going down. Holy hell. I try to jump up but my limbs say, Wait. We are frozen in a fetal position. We must unfold slowly. Like a flower. Fuck that. No time. My jeans and my legs inside them make a creaking sound. I hobble out of the birdcage, dragging my bag.

  And it is a whole other park. The sun streams bright gold. The skyline is ridiculously ornate. I feel like crying when I think of the long walk back to Toff’s mews. My legs won’t make it. They climbed 195 steps today. They are frozen. They are still very much resenting the long flight via Montreal. They have had it up to here (my waist) with me. Let’s sit on that bench for a while.

  No.

  It is dark by the time I reach Toff’s. There’s a light on. I can see into the living room. Sorry, drawing room. It is a sad underwater green. I suspect an overhead light is the culprit.

  Toff appears in the window. There he actually is. On the phone. An open, very open collar. No cravat. He taps his clavicle while he speaks. So he actually has a clavicle. And a phone that works.

  He’s about to get the surprise of his life.

  Knock knock on the glass. He leaps back. I wave.

  The leapling, he curses.

  That’s right. You have something that belongs to me, n’est-ce pas.

  We stare at each other for a moment. He has the look of someone who is seeing the bane of his existence through his own reflection. Finally he gestures at the door. I traverse the front of the house to the stoop.

  He is beside himself with not exactly joy. Audrey, Audrey. I am ushered in. What happened to your face. Lord, what are you doing here. When did you arrive. Etcetera.

  I park my carry-on bag and look past him. Where is the chair and the shaft of golden light and the ropes.

  What about my face, I say.

  He points. To my left there’s a cloudy mirror and I have a black eye in it. And a stye. Which was clearing up until I forgot my antibiotics at home. Not to mention my other battle scars.

  Did someone hit you.

  A hailstone.

  You were out in that. He scratches his head fiercely.

  I stare at his chest. It is so. Visible. He looks entirely
different with a chest.

  How did you get here, he says.

  I extend my arms. Flew.

  No, I mean—

  Air Canada.

  No, I mean—

  Uncle Thoby left this address. Why didn’t you answer my calls. And don’t pull the country code excuse.

  The what excuse.

  There’s a dark staircase behind him. I look up that staircase.

  Have you eaten, he says, taking my coat. I have cheese, he says. I will put out cheese.

  I grab his arm. Is he here.

  He looks blank. Who.

  Uncle Thoby.

  No.

  The drawing room is divided in half by a sofa. On the other side of the sofa, Toff busies himself creating a cheese skyline on the dining-room table.

  Are you hungry, he says when he’s finished.

  Not so much.

  Oh.

  So he gets me a glass of orange juice and something stronger for himself and we sit facing each other from opposing sofas.

  You haven’t seen him at all, I say.

  Not since the airport.

  Which airport.

  Montreal.

  Not Heathrow.

  We were on separate flights.

  Why.

  What is this, an interrogation.

  I look up. It is indeed an overhead light. With a frosted glass shade. A recipe for ghoulishness. Toff looks very pockmarked and ghoulish. But probably not as ghoulish as me. Is he lying.

  Yes, I say.

  Yes what.

  This is an interrogation.

  He looks so helpless over there with his clavicle.

  I know Grandmother isn’t at death’s door. I spoke to her. So the game is up.

  What game. No. Don’t tell me. You’ve got the Clue revolver somewhere on your person.

  Ha ha. I tell him there are many games. Many many games I am currently solving. Okay, two. He is the prime suspect in one. Lionel de Tigrel is the prime suspect in the other.

  Lionel de Tigrel. The wolfish eyes flash.

  So you know him.

  No.

  You look like someone who knows him.

  What does someone who knows him look like.