Gracie issued half a giggle. The top half. She wasn’t sure why. “Hi de ho,” she said. And then she said it again.
“People are attracted to the Mystery,” said the fairy, only to immediately correct herself. “No, not simply attracted, they are unconsciously pulled toward it, they hunger for it, they yearn to connect with it, to get next to it, even to merge with it.”
“They do?”
“They do and always have, although as I said, this longing is deep inside and mostly unconscious.”
“But what is it?”
“If we could say what it is, it wouldn’t be the Mystery, would it? When you stare out of your window into the drizzle and the mist, don’t you sometimes feel that there’s something more to life than what television and the mall and kindergarten and even your family represent; that there’s something grander and stranger, more alive, more free and more real than what any ordinary situation has to offer? Something way beyond? And that it seems to be calling to you, calling even though it doesn’t know your name, your address, how old you are, or give a rip if you’ve washed behind your ears or finished your peas?”
“I guess so.”
“The older you get — and this is a good thing to remember on your birthday, Gracie — the harder it is to interface with the Mystery. Yet adults still thirst for that connection, that alternative to the unsatisfying reality men have constructed for themselves, and which they feel locked into like a dungeon.
“So, they resort to all sorts of things — a few enlightened, many destructive, most ineffective, some just plain silly — that might allow them even a breath or two outside the prison walls. To a certain extent, that explains the appeal of beer.”
“It unlocks them?”
“Well, it temporarily loosens their ties to the stressful world of work and responsibility.”
“Like loosening shoelaces that are tied too tight?”
“Exactly. That’s pretty smart, kiddo. How do you come up with these things?”
Gracie blushed. “Hi de ho,” she said.
Tired of sitting, perhaps, the Beer Fairy suddenly rocketed up in the air, where she performed an acrobatic triple loop a few inches from Gracie’s nose. By no means, however, was she done talking. “Let me be clear,” she said as she hovered, “beer is not a part of the actual Mystery or even connected to it in any direct way. No, no. Beer is merely a vehicle.
“On rare occasions, and for very brief moments, that vehicle may carry a person beyond the state of being glad and dizzy (and I’m all for glad and dizzy, you know, glad and dizzy is my neighborhood); may shoot them through an opening between the glad and the dizzy…”
“Is it like Alice’s rabbit hole to Wonderland?”
“It’s much smaller than that.”
“Like a mouse hole?”
“Smaller. More like a crack in the egg of a barley beetle.”
“Oh.”
“Beer, if it’s just the right amount — not too little and definitely not too much — may on occasion transport one through that crack and carry one close enough to the gates of the Mystery so that one’s granted a quick but entirely rapturous peek inside.”
“What’s it look like?”
The fairy smiled and rotated her wings. “Everything. And nothing. Both at the same time. What does the electricity inside your atoms look like? What do forever and laughter and liberty look like? It’s the face everybody shared before they were born and the joke they’ll finally get after they’re dead. It’s the meaning of meaning, the other that has no further, and the which of which there is no whicher.”
While Gracie was trying vainly to picture such a thing, her wee guide said, “Be warned. When considering beer as a vehicle, one had better bear in mind that it’s hardly reliable transportation. It’s a very old cart, in fact; a wagon pushed and pulled by forgotten forces, by agricultural spirits, the ancient spirits of grain and the land. It’s a wagon, my dear, that can easily swerve and run off the road.”
Now, kids, if that grandpa of yours hasn’t given up and wandered off to watch a ball game on TV, he may well be skipping over this part of the story, believing that you couldn’t possibly relate to all this stuff about a Fifth Element, about the Mystery, about magic, ancient grain spirits, and so forth.
He’s wrong, isn’t he? Because almost every child between the ages of, say, three and twelve (and a few lucky ones much older) seems at least vaguely aware of the presence of a separate reality: some half-familiar, magical Other World that, even when spooky or threatening, both thrills and nurtures them more than the reality that modern adult society would have them buy into. Do you agree? And do you think now might be the time to encourage gramps to pop open another brewski?
In any event, before the fairy could say more (if, indeed, she intended to say more), she and Gracie were startled by the sound of screaming and crying. They turned to see a terrified young woman clawing her way up the grassy hillside, while close behind, two men pursued her, smirking, panting, and lurching, obviously intending to do her harm.
16
As the shrieking maiden, wild-eyed and bloody-kneed, neared the summit of the hill, the Beer Fairy was the first to act. Like a redheaded bullet with its pants on fire, she sent herself zinging at the nearest of the two pursuers. She circled his head, poking him in the eye, then the ear, then the eye again, with her wand. Around and around his head she buzzed, her wings whirring, her wand stabbing.
The fellow must have believed he’d disturbed a nest of oversize, particularly disagreeable bees. Cursing the entire insect species and the Satan who surely created it, he swatted furiously at the fairy, who continued to circle his head with blurry speed. She rammed her wand up his nostril. He snorted. She shoved it in his ear. He yelped. Turning in circles, he was fast becoming dizzy, though anything but glad. The fact that he was intoxicated to begin with didn’t help his coordination.
Finally, however, one of his swats connected. He was a hefty farmboy type and the strength of his swat sent the dainty pixie hurtling head over heels to the turf. Stunned, she lay in the grass, breathing hard, crown askew, her tiny back throbbing with pain.
Meanwhile, the young woman had reached the hilltop, where she stumbled forward, allowing the second attacker to catch up with her. Before she could regain her feet, he grabbed her roughly by the wrist. Although out of breath, he was sniggering, and cooing some insane kind of baby talk.
Gracie knew she must intervene — but how? For one thing, she couldn’t remember which side of the Seam she was on. She thought that after they’d poofed out of the brewery, she and the fairy had returned to This Side, but she couldn’t be sure; and if they had not, neither the attacker nor his victim could see or hear her.
Uncertain just how to proceed, she ran up to the big snockered lout and yelled in her deepest voice (which was not much deeper than the chirp of a nervous cricket), “Stop! Let her go, you stupid man!” The lout didn’t release the hysterical woman, but his leer switched to an expression of great surprise. What was this child doing here? Apparently, he’d heard and seen Gracie all too well, and was now looking around frantically to ascertain whether or not she was accompanied by adults.
Back in early September, when Mr. Perkel had been the coach of Gracie’s peewee soccer team — this was before a group of the soccer moms had banded together and fired him — he’d drilled his daughter over and over on what he called the “lawyer kick.” It was a way to kick an opposing player in the leg so hard she’d topple over and have to leave the game, yet was so sneaky that most of the time the referee would fail to notice it, so wouldn’t assess a penalty. Gracie considered it a dirty trick and she never tried it, but she remembered it perfectly well.